Streaming Live Skeletal & Tracking Data

Two generations of the same live-ingestion system, both on GCP, show how I evolve infrastructure as requirements grow: a RabbitMQ pipeline that carried FIFA certification events through 2023, and the gRPC service that replaced it from 2024 onward.

Project period · 2021 – present

RabbitMQ live ingestion (2021 – 2023)

I built a live data-collection service on GCP using RabbitMQ to center-of-mass, skeletal tracking and connected-ball data during FIFA technology-certification events and testing sessions, including the validation work behind Semi-Automated Offside Technology (SAOT). It carried certification-event traffic through 2023, when I replaced it with a gRPC-based system built for the scale the next generation of events demanded.

gRPC live ingestion (2024 – present)

I engineered a gRPC service on GCP as the future-proofed successor to the RabbitMQ pipeline, capable of consuming live soccer tracking and skeletal data and automatically storing and ingesting it. This system has been used during FIFA technology-certification events since 2024, and has sustained peak loads of ~10 MB/s over event sessions with ~50 ms p99 end-to-end latency.

Architecture as a decision

Across both generations, the objective was not infrastructure for its own sake. RabbitMQ met the certification events of 2021–2023; as those events outgrew it, gRPC took over as the more scalable, future-proofed replacement, running FIFA certification events since 2024.