Data is at the heart of baseball whether it’s calculating batting averages or hot dog sales. The governing body of the sport known as America’s National Pastime is processing, analyzing, and ultimately making decisions for Major League Baseball (MLB).
Based on that data is key to running a successful organization and have increasingly turned to Google Cloud to help them do it. Across the US and Canada, MLB supports 30 teams. At the edge with on-premises data centers as well as running workloads in the cloud at each of their ballparks. They can containerize those workloads using Anthos and run them in the location. It helps them makes the most sense for the application.
As per Kris Amy, VP of Technology Infrastructure at Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball is America’s pastime. MLB process and analyze extreme amounts of data as they have millions of fans around the world. Google Cloud is known for its tremendous expertise in containerization, AI, and big data, running in Google Cloud, or running on-prem in stadiums, the advantage of the expertise is enabled by Anthos. Anthos is the vehicle used to run applications anywhere and it can be in a ballpark or the cloud.
For delivering stats in the stadium, to fans, or broadcast, or the scoreboard is the situation where we have to do computing in the park for latency reasons. Anthos helps to provide the data to whoever is consuming it after processing the data. It is especially the key for developers as it spreads uniformity across the deployment environment. The differences between whether they’re running in the cloud or running on-prem in a datacentre or one of our stadiums are not required to be known.
For instance, MLB could run the code across the city at Citi Field if something were to happen during a broadcast at Yankee Stadium. The Mets play and continue broadcasting without interruption. MLB can shoot that data up to Google Cloud and process it there if they had any issue in any stadium.
18 months ago, MLB started the journey of modernizing application stack. There were various siloed applications and now they are eager to move down the path of containerizing everything and using that as our path forward for deploying applications. Whether that’s a miniature data center running in the stadium, or a true data center, or in Google Cloud, they had uniformity across all of our environments. Containers were chosen which made them well down the path and then the problem of “what do we do once we want to run this in the stadium?” got considered.
They saw Google and noticed that Anthos was coming. Regardless of whether they’re in the stadium or the cloud, MLB got excited because it seemed like the simplest and easiest solution for managing these applications and deploying them. That journey took about 12 months and as of the opening day this year, they have been running applications in stadiums on Anthos.
