Major League Baseball Trusts MOJO Platform!

MOJO Platform Orchestrates MLB's Bare Metal.

Background

At the end of the 2019 baseball season, MLB began a hardware refresh across all our major league ballparks providing us with an opportunity to rebuild our server infrastructure using a DevOps approach.

Goals of the Refresh

• Simplify infrastructure management into a single pane of glass across 30 MLB ballparks
• Streamline app deployments with CI/CD tools
• Reduce costs by removing virtualization and running everything on Anthos bare metal
• Create a resilient ballpark cluster that could handle hardware failures
• Deliver the solution within a tight schedule for the start of the 2021 MLB season

Our Ballpark Infrastructure

All of our MLB ballparks have limited data center space and for each, we have a condensed and optimized footprint of four servers. These four servers are responsible for running applications that are critical to the game of baseball including our Statcast and Hawk-Eye solutions.

Why GKE OnPrem?

We have limited space in the ballpark datacenters and Kubernetes provides us with the flexibility we need. In the past we were running a traditional VMware stack on physical machines, over-provisioning each VM with 8 vCPUs and 32G of memory to run applications that only required a fraction of these resources. GKE was an obvious choice, allowing us to allocate the appropriate CPU and Memory resources at the pod level.

How Did We Do It?

Through automation and a lot of hard work. Deploying new technology to 30 data centers is no easy task without the use of automation tools.

This was achieved by setting up and using MOJO — a hardware orchestration tool produced by Metify that utilizes Redfish to interact with the bare metal servers and PXE boot them. One MOJO instance can manage hundreds of bare metal servers, greatly reducing the level of effort required. MOJO also allows us to manage BIOS and firmware of the servers so we are able to keep pace with patches and security hotfixes.

By running Anthos on bare metal without VMware, we have a much cleaner and simpler environment to manage. The cost savings alone are enough to make the switch worthwhile.