Olympique de Marseille supports a growing fanbase with new projects built on Platform.sh

25 November, 2024

Overview

Challenge

To simultaneously build, test, deploy, and scale 2 critical applications in just a few months, using a variety of programming languages and frameworks

Solution

Build both applications with Platform.sh, creating individual dev environments with staging that perfectly replicates production—streamlining development, simplifying deployment, and ensuring scalability

Results

Generate 3 repositories to eliminate challenges with simultaneous deployment
Simplify monitoring and troubleshooting for OM Connect with Blackfire observability
Improve ease and speed of deployment
Successfully manage sudden traffic surges (100-200x increase in visitors) without impacting the fan experience

Olympique de Marseille (OM) is a professional football club in Ligue 1, the elite French football league. Founded in 1899, the club now holds nearly 30 titles across its league, France, and all of Europe. Its loyal fanbase of 25 million considers Marseille an integral part of their lives.

Due to the popularity and success of the club, Marseille’s digital team manages about 30 diverse applications. With internal sites for operations along with fan-facing applications to manage digital entry, VIP stadium experiences, and more, the development team at Marseille certainly stays busy.

Yet, they recognize that every programming language has a technical limit, and every digital need requires a unique solution. So Marseille’s developers approach each project with curiosity. They can code in any language required for the best results: PHP, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and more.

With so many sites and applications, choosing the right managed hosting provider for each project is critical, too. So, when Head of Digital Jessy Hanzo saw his colleagues' success using Platform.sh, he was inspired to explore.

Navigating Platform.sh as a new user

Marseille’s core website, OM.fr, has been with Platform.sh since 2019. So when Jessy joined OM in January 2022, he quickly discovered what his developers loved about it.

“I learned how to use Platform.sh myself, and it was very easy for me and my team,”

recalls Jessy.

“The support that we had was very good.”

Jessy manages a team of developers and project managers at Marseille, dealing in both functional and technical topics across the club. He’s responsible for selecting the best approach, the right solutions, and the ideal contractors and teams for all of Marseille’s digital products.

As he gained familiarity with Platform.sh, Jessy grew excited about using it for future initiatives. His first project? Changing the database management system for OM.fr.

The push to accommodate live sports data tracking

Jessy worried that Marseille’s main website, OM.fr, lacked the database support required for the elite club’s robust data tracking and storage needs.

Working with Platform.sh to identify the right solution, he selected MongoDB—and Jessy’s team prepared to shift a mountain of data on the backend. Typically, database migration isn’t simple, but Jessy felt confident.

“One of the main advantages of Platform.sh is the ability to customize products,”

says Jessy.

“It was very easy to move to MongoDB with Platform.sh, whereas it can be very difficult with other services, requiring multiple agreement updates and other complexities.”

Thanks to MongoDB, OM.fr can support powerful data tracking tools. For example, Stats Perform generates live statistical updates for every league, championship, and match. With that amount and specificity of data, noSQL tech like MongoDB is essential for optimal performance.

And as the club’s technology needs continue to grow, Jessy knows he’ll have no trouble integrating legacy systems with new frameworks and tools. He remarks,

“With Platform.sh, it’s very easy to add more services and to scale.”

New projects demand an efficient approach

At the start of 2024, Jessy’s team began to scope and design two new key initiatives:

OM Connect, a product uniting Marseille fans in a digital landscape
Top Bar, a data initiative to create a unified, comprehensive view of the customer journey by injecting script in the top navigation bar across all Marseille websites

Building on the success of OM.fr, Jessy knew he wanted to build and deploy both projects with Platform.sh.

Initially, OM Connect and Top Bar used the same repository and shared dev environments. But this quickly proved problematic. Deploying updates for both projects simultaneously led to delays and frustration.

So Jessy consulted the Platform.sh team. Together, they created an effective solution to give each project its own environment and a third repository for the Olympique de Marseille design system. Since then, the team has streamlined development and improved performance in these initiatives.

“With separate environments and GitHub Actions, it’s easy for us to deploy very quickly just by pushing some code,”

says Jessy.

And when issues do arise, Blackfire observability makes it easy to identify and resolve any challenges.

“When there’s an error, I need to see how many times the error occurs and understand where it comes from, and just looking at the logs isn’t enough—it’s not sufficient,”

Jessy explains.

“So it’s really nice to have Blackfire because before, it was a nightmare to dive into issues.”

Support, speed, and scalability drive continued success for Marseille

Testing projects with a new PaaS can be complex, with many unknowns. But for Jessy, working with a team that truly cares about its customers makes a big difference.

“I'm very satisfied with the support at Platform.sh,”

Jessy explains.

“It's good to know that the support team can respond very quickly because at Olympique de Marseille, we have a lot of peaks in traffic. For example, when a football match starts, traffic to the website can increase by 100-200x. So we need the ability to accommodate and answer our customers very quickly.”

With volatile traffic demands, speed and scalability are top priorities for Marseille. They’re also the main reasons Jessy would recommend Platform.sh to others:

“If there’s a strong need to deploy different websites with scalability and the ability to deploy very quickly, of course, I’ll recommend Platform.sh.”