In a rapidly emerging market that combines the complexity of e-commerce, trading floors, and banking—all under stringent state-by-state regulations—FanDuel needed an API backbone capable of handling billions of requests while maintaining compliance and delivering flawless user experiences during high-stakes moments.

In a session at API Summit 2025, Jon Kiner, Engineering Manager – Platform Engineering, shared how FanDuel balances innovation in a highly regulated industry with Kong.

FanDuel faces a unique combination of technical and regulatory challenges that are unlike most technology companies. Every state that allows online sports betting has its own specific regulations, with the most critical being location-based technology requirements. As Kiner explained, "in states where online sports betting is allowed, all of the services and data have to reside in that state."

This requirement stems from the federal Wire Act of 1961, originally enacted to combat organized crime. It means FanDuel must maintain on-premise workloads—including sportsbook, account and wallet services, and casino products—in individual state data centers using AWS Outposts. The company became "the largest AWS Outpost customer in the world," managing multiple data centers per state with redundancy for site reliability.

The infrastructure complexity multiplies rapidly. Kiner described how "as soon as you start to scale, it gets difficult real quickly" with clients routing through CloudFront distributions into AWS regions that must determine the user's state and send traffic to the appropriate outpost through complex tunnel connections. And all of this must be done in a matter of moments.

Beyond the infrastructure, FanDuel must support real-time odds calculations during live sporting events with extremely low latency for millions of concurrent users. The company processes ever-changing sports rules across multiple leagues while maintaining identity verification, geolocation verification, content filtering, and comprehensive government reporting. As Kiner emphasized, product failure during critical moments—like a Super Bowl play when a user wants to place a bet—would be catastrophic: "The product would fail immediately. This company wouldn't exist if that were the case."

FanDuel implemented Kong as a comprehensive edge security and routing solution across their complex multi-state, multi-outpost architecture. Kong sits at critical network boundaries throughout FanDuel's infrastructure, providing the security, observability, and traffic control needed for a highly regulated environment.

As Kiner described their architecture vision: "Kong really sits at the edge… All of the traffic coming into FanDuel goes through a DMZ controlled by Kong that provides that security and all the observability we need."

Kong routes traffic from clients to different AWS Outposts in state-specific data centers, managing connections to both EKS (Kubernetes) and EC2 solutions. Critically, Kong handles routing "across those availability zones. So in this case, this is two different states with two availability zones. So two outposts in a state. Kong can be that edge on both sides of the states."

Because FanDuel operates multiple product domains—sportsbook, fantasy, casino, horse racing—Kong also provides inter-product routing. "Having Kong be able to route between one product to another, like from sportsbook to casino, you can have an edge there. So each area can have its own security setup. It can have its own traffic control, and Kong can provide all of that for us."

The scalability is essential for handling traffic spikes. Kong enables FanDuel to scale out data planes on demand before major events. "If we don't even want to do the auto scaling, we'll just create a whole bunch of data planes to route that traffic and Kong allows us to do that."

This architecture integrates with FanDuel's broader platform engineering strategy called Podium, their platform-as-a-service that provides engineers with standardized deployment capabilities, CI/CD pipelines, and observability across all products.

FanDuel processes extraordinary traffic volumes through Kong while maintaining the low-latency, high-reliability performance their regulated business demands. During NFL season alone, the platform handles "about six to seven billion requests weekly through a few products."

The real test comes during peak events. "The Super Bowl will have between one billion and two billion requests on that day alone," Kiner noted. Kong's ability to scale enables FanDuel to handle these massive spikes without performance degradation during the moments that matter most to users and the business.

FanDuel's approach to production readiness includes "FanDuel Game Days"—large-scale production load testing events conducted before major sporting events like the Super Bowl, March Madness, and the Derby. These game days ensure their Kong-powered infrastructure can handle predicted traffic while identifying potential bottlenecks before they impact users.

The platform enables FanDuel to release at an impressive velocity despite heavy regulation. In 2025 alone, "FanDuel has released 7,000 regulated software changes" with many more non-regulated changes deployed continuously. Kong's security and observability capabilities support this release cadence while maintaining compliance across all state-specific deployments.

By providing consistent security, routing, and traffic control across a complex multi-state outpost architecture, Kong enables FanDuel to deliver flawless real-time experiences during the high-stakes moments that define sports betting—all while meeting stringent regulatory requirements.