Brainstorming – Common DevOps Use Cases in Some of the Biggest Companies in the World

Brainstorming

MLB problem was one that affected the game and people’s enjoyment of it. People hate it when you waste their time, and they hate slow games. Anyone who has ever watched the last two minutes of a close NBA playoff game knows. MLB approached this problem by looking at the time taken every inning and what were the longest aspects of those innings. They realized that pickoffs and the time taken by pitchers to wind up their pitch were slowing down the game. This led to the creation of the pitch clock, a timer for how long a pitcher can wait between pitches thrown. They had determined that this time between pitches was the main reason that the game had slowed down and they believed that the clock would rectify the situation. It was implemented using GCP and DevOps principles combining the GCP services with on-premises timing hardware. And as a fan, I am very grateful for it as well. We will discuss the full extent of the solution in the next section.

The problem with the AFL was one of youth outreach and the physical limitations that some people have when attempting to play the sport. Australia is also a massive country with a very widespread populace, meaning that people in rural areas who needed training in Aussie rules football would need to have their training and coaching administered remotely. The goal then became to reach as many people as possible and to do so with as much data as possible so that it would be accurate, and also to reach people who are impaired in some form of communication. This problem required an approach of communication between devices as well as the use of ML algorithms, particularly for use in tracking the ball used in the sport with respect to the player who is being coached.

So, looking at these problems, and the approaches we could potentially take to solve them, we can now start coming up with a couple of solutions that might help these organizations achieve their goals. Let’s see what exactly it was that they did to achieve these goals.

Solution

The solution to MLB’s problems involved using Google Cloud’s Anthos service mesh to coordinate all the pitch clocks together. Centralized yet distributed time clocks added to the integrity of the game and these new rules.

The problem with MLB was one of synchronization. The goal was to synchronize the play clocks that were running throughout the stadium, to coordinate their timing. Here, Google used their Anthos service mesh (as shown in the following diagram) as a sort of connector between a number of devices in the cloud and on-premises devices at baseball stadiums. This allowed the timer for pitchers to be visible and accurate everywhere with no delays, ensuring the fairness of the new system.

Figure 10.7 – Anthos synchronized game clock for MLB