Providing answers fast
Following a quick, trouble-free onboarding to the DoiT systems, Chess.com saw the difference immediately. “Straight away, I noticed how much easier it was to communicate with DoiT than it had been with our previous support provider,” says Dlugolecki. “We can get an almost instant answer from DoiT via our dedicated Slack channel, we can talk directly with DoiT engineers via Google Meet, and we get fast responses from the ticketing system, often within 15 minutes.”
Taking latency out of the game
Lessening any technical delays between chess moves is crucial when playing online. The Chess.com team is now looking at the global distribution of its servers to provide optimal routing to minimize latency, and DoiT is always on hand to offer advice and support. When Chess.com suddenly began experiencing random 100% CPU, for example, DoiT came to the rescue fast. “This was impacting one of our most important services deployed in Google Cloud, and we were finding it hard to debug,” explains Dlugolecki. “It was caused by a low-level networking issue and the large scale of connections that the service was handling, around 300,000 per second, causing high spikes in latency. DoiT helped solve the problem by showing us how to make improvements to the low-level network-tuning.”
Providing a holistic view of all the Chess pieces
While its members are busy playing chess with minimal latency, behind the scenes, the Chess.com team is running a lot of systems that analyze each game, detect cheating and recommend player improvements. And to service all of this, Chess.com runs some operations on other cloud services. Previously, it was difficult to get an overview of how all its cloud services worked together, but DoiT’s technology platform helps Chess.com get a clearer picture of its cloud use and billing. “The DoiT platform gives us a unified view of multiple Google Cloud accounts and our other cloud providers on one panel,” says Dlugolecki. “I also like the anomaly alerts, which show spikes in our cloud billing across our projects, highlighting if any of our GCP projects are suddenly seeing a rise in costs in a non-linear way.”