This week, Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey welcome Perry Pierce and JoAnn Brereton of Major League Baseball to the show to talk sports and cloud. Baseball teams are independently owned franchises, Perry explains, with MLB acting as the oversight corporation. This keeps game play fair and consistent. Like most large corporations these days, technology has become a vital business tool for MLB. Their partnership with Google facilitated a shift from on-prem to the cloud, allowing MLB to take advantage of advanced capabilities like scaling and managed services in a safe environment. JoAnn talks about the process of this shift and the teams at Google that helped make it happen. She details the systems that MLB has moved to GCP, like game scheduling, umpire management, backend systems, and especially the draft.

The amateur draft, a multi-day event, has a special set of challenges that MLB and Google had to overcome. Analyzing player statistics and updating which players have been picked and who is still available are important information for teams. These stats must update quickly and accurately. On the backend, the Electronic Baseball Information System (EBIS) is the MLB software making this all happen, and JoAnn helps us understand the technical side of this Kubernetes-built platform. Google monitoring and EBIS-specific tools keep the draft running smoothly. Our guests take us through this list of tools employed and why they were chosen.

We hear more about the process of moving such a complicated system to the cloud and what MLB did to make the shift easier. Perry and JoAnn talk about the testing done before draft days to ensure a smooth experience for all and important lessons they learned. To wrap up the show, our guests offer advice, stressing the importance of observability and starting small. Major League Baseball trademarks used with permission.

Perry Pierce

Baseball is what Perry Pierce loves and tech is what he does. Living at the intersection of sports and tech is a cool place to be!

JoAnn Brereton

JoAnn loves baseball and tech, so she’s happy to be working at a job where she gets to do both.

Cool things of the week

• Cloud NAT explained! blog
• Build your data analytics skills with the latest no cost BigQuery trainings blog
• Introducing Workflows callbacks blog

Interview

• MLB site
• MLB Draft site
• Kubernetes site
• Grafana site
• Inside Baseball: How MLB Transactions Actually Get Done blog
• LBi Software site

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Brian has been working on a YouTube series on VMs with Carter Morgan.

Next week is Google Cloud Next!