Gaming Archives - Kai Waehner

Real Time Gaming with Apache Kafka Powers Dream11 Fantasy Sports

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4 minute read

Powering Fantasy Sports at Scale: How Dream11 Uses Apache Kafka for Real-Time Gaming

ByKai Waehner
19. May 2025

Fantasy sports has evolved into a data-driven, real-time digital industry with high stakes and massive user engagement. At the heart of this transformation is Dream11, India’s leading fantasy sports platform, which relies on Apache Kafka to deliver instant updates, seamless gameplay, and trustworthy user experiences for over 230 million fans. This blog post explores how Dream11 leverages Kafka to meet extreme traffic demands, scale infrastructure efficiently, and maintain real-time responsiveness—even during the busiest moments of live sports.

Dynamic Pricing with Data Streaming using Apache Kafka and Flink

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8 minute read

A New Era in Dynamic Pricing: Real-Time Data Streaming with Apache Kafka and Flink

ByKai Waehner
14. November 2024

In the age of digitization, the concept of pricing is no longer fixed or manual. Instead, companies increasingly use dynamic pricing — a flexible model that adjusts prices based on real-time market changes to enable real-time responsiveness, giving companies the tools they need to respond instantly to demand, competitor prices, and customer behaviors. This blog post explores the fundamentals of dynamic pricing, its link to data streaming, and real-world examples across different industries such as retail, logistics, gaming and the energy sector.

5.4K views
6 minute read

The State of Data Streaming for Gaming

ByKai Waehner
1. November 2023

This blog post explores the state of data streaming for the gaming industry, including customer stories from Kakao Games, Mobile Premier League (MLP), Demonware / Blizzard, and more. A complete slide deck and on-demand video recording are included.

43.9K views
18 minute read

When NOT to use Apache Kafka?

ByKai Waehner
4. January 2022
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Apache Kafka is the de facto standard for event streaming to process data in motion. This blog post explores when NOT to use Apache Kafka. What use cases are not a good fit for Kafka? What limitations does Kafka have? How to qualify Kafka out as it is not the right tool for the job?