Hybrid cloud technology can help organizations of all sizes, in any industry. Even one of the world’s most beloved sporting events.

The Masters hybrid multi-cloud architecture allows them to harness data in real time, provides a common platform to build and manage applications and IT, and enables developers to build applications once and deploy them anywhere. And Red Hat® OpenShift®, a containerized Kubernetes platform that automates orchestration across clouds and provides on-demand access to resources, is the solution that ties it all together.

This infrastructure is essential to the Masters app with intensive, mission-critical workloads running across four public clouds and two private ones. The system scales on demand and provides ample redundancy. It is also designed to accelerate the development process.

“Innovation cycles used to be measured in months or years; now they can be  measured in weeks or even days,” says Noah Syken, Vice President of Sports and Entertainment Partnerships at IBM. “The Masters’ open, flexible hybrid cloud infrastructure is the key to accelerating their time to value.”

“We use GPU machines running on hybrid cloud to speed the training of our AI models, which helps us iterate more quickly to create innovative solutions,” says Monica Ellingson, Practice Lead for IBM iX® Sports and Entertainment.

Those innovative solutions include two new features in the Masters app this year: AI-driven spoken commentary and Projected Score with IBM Watson®. There are 53 OpenShift applications that support AI commentary and another 18 that support Projected Score, deployed as Kubernetes clusters spread out across 30 bare metal machines, each with 8 cores and 64GB of RAM. The Red Hat OpenShift implementation allows the clusters to be integrated with the source code so the containers can be seamlessly deployed across three geographic zones.

The setup includes a shared mount for AI models so that the apps can read from it, with OpenShift enabling exposure of basic authenticated, protected public endpoints. Horizontal pod scalers adjust the size of the OpenShift apps in accordance with data processing traffic.

“The infrastructure integrates and connects data and AI components so we can create an enterprise-grade, AI-based solution across the AI commentary and Projected Score applications, along with the Player Insights system that uses another 16 OpenShift apps,” says Baughman.

Supporting data in its journey from collection to consumer

The hybrid cloud architecture in use at the Masters provides wide-ranging data benefits from end to end. “The Red Hat OpenShift clusters support the integration of golf data as it travels from on-premises devices and servers to the GPT system that works with our large language model to understand and interpret the rules of golf for the AI commentary application,” says Baughman. The same goes for Projected Score and Player Insights. “We’re taking all this information and creating  drive data from all the stats we get or simulate, and all that transformed or predictions-based data journeys through the AI pipeline on OpenShift to create nuggets of insight about each player.”

A transformation strategy built on hybrid cloud can provide simplification and integration of enterprise IT. But enterprises that stop short of hybrid cloud mastery can potentially leave deep sources of value out of reach. In a recent survey by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), almost a third of cloud adopters surveyed reported being stalled in their journeys, partly due to unexpected increases in operating costs. IBM Consulting can help enterprise clients overcome common challenges on the journey to hybrid cloud. These include defining IT architecture across a crowded cloud estate, eliminating operational silos, managing and advancing security, maximizing effectiveness of investments and aligning with ecosystem partners.

“Our collaboration with the Masters is an example of how hybrid cloud mastery drives value at a modern, experience-focused sports and entertainment organization,” says Syken. “We’re using these same technologies to drive business transformation for our clients across dozens of industries around the world.”