Betfair's move from ASP.Net to Java

ONLINE GAMBLING giant Betfair (www.betfair.co.uk) announced last month that the firm redesigned its web site to base its back-end on Sun's Java (J2EE, or "server-side java" in plain english) instead of Microsoft's ".Net". Besides taking online bets, the company boasts its winning of the "2--3 Queen's Award for Enterprise", in the "Innovation category".

Let's now forget the Queen and online gambling and focus on IT: the company said they took a lot of time to evaluate the strenghts and weaknesses of both Microsoft's .Net and J2EE at the early stages of the project, and ultimately decided to go with Java due to the platform's "proven enterprise track record, security, and maintainability". The firm also noted that "(Microsoft's) .Net offered faster development and performance, but for a mission-critical, 24x7 site such as Betfair.com, we chose the proven, secure technology".

Before the move, Betfair's site suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks at least three times, with the last one apparently last July. Such DDOS attacks prevented some visitors from placing their bets and some customers claimed to have lost money.

David Yu, the site's CTO said the re-engineering of the site was needed, thinking about the site's long-term expansion: "Like most software, you eventually outgrow the first version and need to do a clean slate design to get to the next level. We wanted to rebuild the site before the platform began to limit growth" he said.

The new site back-end runs JBoss open source Java Application Server, Coherence from Tangosol for caching, and Oracle as its database. Their old ASP-based site was retired from the web a few weeks ago.

David Yu speaks to the INQ
Given this background, I wanted to have a face-to-face (ok, email-to-email) talk with the person behind this move, and he agreed to speak with INQ. Here's the mini-interview:

INQ: Can you describe betfair.com and the company history to our international readers?
David Yu: Betfair, launched in June 2000, is the world's leading betting exchange. A betting exchange is a bookmaker that allows punters to bet at prices set by themselves rather than prices dictated to them by the traditional bookmaker. With the advent of the internet, the concept of the betting exchange - a system that would match counterparties on event outcomes - was envisaged by the company's founders in the late 90s. The internet provided a platform where thousands of differing punters' opinions could be matched instantly. The hurdle, of course, was the technology needed to be able to process potentially thousands of bets a minute, at different odds and stakes sizes, across various currencies and all time-sensitive. An exchange also offers features such as highly-dynamic in-running betting (betting while the match or race is underway) that could not be offerred by traditional bookmakers.

INQ: so far, how's it going?
D.Y.: In January 2002, Betfair acquired Flutter.com, its nearest rival. Since that event, the number of registered users and betting activity have risen exponentially. We process over 1.5 million trades per day, more than many large financial exchanges. Currently, it has over 250,000 registered users in over 80 countries. It offers over 5,000 different markets on which to bet and has unrivaled liquidity.

(Besides the 2003 Queen's Award) Betfair won the 2004 National Business Award for Best Use of Technology. Edward Wray and Andrew Black, our founders, were awarded the Ernst & Young 2002 UK Emerging Entrepreneurs of Year.

INQ: Can you tell me more about any DDOS attacks betfair has suffered? When did it happen, and how much downtime you experienced?
D.Y.: I do not wish to add any more than has been published in the press, for obvious security reasons.

INQ: When did you start considering .Net and J2EE, and why?
D.Y.: We started this evaluation two years ago when we embarked on a complete re-write of our client applications. We wanted to apply the learnings we had gained over the past 2 years, e.g. multi-language, multi-currency, usage patterns, etc. We wanted to develop a new platform that would allow us to innovate more quickly by enabling more rapid, modular development. Finally, the new platform provides greater scalability to meet with our increased capacity demands.

INQ: What are the strongest features of Java that you found in your evaluation?
D.Y.: At the top of the list were its reputation for enterprise class security and reliability. Other features that we found important were maintainability and scalability.

INQ: Do you tink avoiding vendor lock-in by developing in J2EE instead of windows-centric .Net is important?

D.Y.: Yes, but only to some degree. On one hand, using Java/J2EE does enable us to move to other vendors - we currently use JBoss as our application server. In practice, though, changing web or application servers is a non-trivial undertaking factoring in the amount of testing and production support needed for a 24x7, high-volume website transacting millions of pounds sterling each day.

INQ: On a personal note, I'm currently puzzled by why so few sites are currently implementing html compression to save bandwidth and deliver better performance to the visitors. (Like installing and using the "mod gzip" module in Apache). It's touted to provide savings of up to two-thirds in bandwidth. Have you evaluated implementing html compression (either by migrating to the new IIS 6.0 or moving to Apache?).
D.Y.: We do compress our html, but use other devices which provide faster compression and offload the webservers.

INQ: One argument I often hear from the .net camp is that anyone with Visual Basic skills can write programs in the .net framework, and that as such developers can be found more easily (and cheaply) than java programmers. Do you think that's a valid argument?
D.Y.: Betfair is extremely rigorous in our hiring and have a very lengthy interview process to find the best candidates. Platform experience is only one criterion we use in our hiring, so this statement is not entirely applicable to us. We believe that it's far more important to find highly intelligent engineers who have experience in fast-paced, high volume, dynamic environments. We've chosen to mix technologies; the web site has been moved to Java/J2EE, but we continue using .Net for our GUI back-end tools, as it gives us faster development times and performance. Many of our best engineers are equally skilled using .NET or J2EE, and none are cheap. µ

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