Case study

Starting the San Francisco Giants' Move to Google Cloud

Sakura Sky ran an eight-day Accelerate programme with the San Francisco Giants to start moving their baseball data system, built in the early 2000s, to Google Cloud.
Results
  • Working prototype pipeline on Google Cloud, using Statcast data
  • Reference architecture for the club’s data on Google Cloud
  • Product roadmap and initial backlog agreed with the club
  • Data sources ranked for migration, with Trackman first
Customer
San Francisco Giants
Year

The San Francisco Giants’ baseball system was built in the early 2000s. At that time it took data from fewer than 5 external sources. By 2018 it took data from more than 40, including Trackman, Statcast, and Rapsodo, and the system was reaching its limits in both computing power and engineering effort. Most of its web applications were written in Classic ASP, and most data processing ran as stored procedures in Microsoft SQL Server.

The club planned to use the 2018 to 2019 off-season to start moving and rebuilding parts of the system on Google Cloud. Sakura Sky helped them start. Today this kind of work is part of our Data & AI practice.

What we did

We delivered an eight-day Accelerate programme in two sprints, in November and December 2018.

  • Roadmap and backlog. Working sessions with the club’s team produced a product roadmap and an initial backlog.
  • A working prototype. We built a prototype pipeline using Statcast data, chosen because it was a smaller first step. It ran on Cloud Composer, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery, and we tested data transformations in Dataflow and Dataprep.
  • Migration priorities. We mapped the club’s data sources to the systems that use them and ranked them for migration. Trackman, which the project report calls “arguably the most critical data source” for the club, was the first priority before spring 2019.
  • Recommendations. A reference architecture and recommendations for the next stages of the move.

Outcomes

  • A working prototype pipeline on Google Cloud, built with the club’s team.
  • A reference architecture, a product roadmap, and an initial backlog.
  • A clear order for moving the club’s data sources, starting with Trackman.

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