Transforming Baseball with Data-Driven Precision
A New Season for Data & ML at the Miami Marlins
The Miami Marlins partnered with CloudKite to move faster, scale smarter, and unlock better insights.
Modernizing Data Infrastructure for Smarter Baseball Operations
The Miami Marlins’ Research & Development organization plays a central role in supporting player evaluation, forecasting, and data-driven baseball operations. As the department expanded and invested in new analytical capabilities, the Marlins sought a modern engineering foundation to help their teams move faster, innovate more effectively, and support the growing R&D department demands.
Together, the Marlins and CloudKite built the foundation for a modern data and ML. CloudKite’s cloud and DevOps expertise, combined with the Marlins’ deep engineering talent, created scalable systems and mature engineering practices.
The Challenge
Outdated Systems, Limited Scalability
Before partnering with CloudKite, the Marlins organization depended on outdated, on-premises infrastructure. Their operations, including network hardware, application servers, and databases were fully reliant on physical servers located in their offices. This required their engineering team to manage all maintenance, deployments, access control, and support manually, which led to the following consequences:
Engineers spent as much as 40% of their week on support and maintenance
Existing infrastructure couldn’t scale with new data sources or ML initiatives
No unified cloud environment existed
The team struggled to specialize due to operational overhead
New hires took significant time to onboard into existing systems
The organization recognized the urgent need to modernize, to empower analysts and ML engineers, accelerate forecasting, enhance decision making, and win more baseball games.
The Partnership
Collaborative Success with the Marlins
The Marlins sought a partner with a strong commitment to modern cloud best practices. Due to our extensive GCP experience and existing MLB relationships, CloudKite was chosen as a trusted partner. CloudKite went beyond simple implementation, helping to define the standards of a modern engineering organization.
CloudKite embedded directly with the Marlins team, helping with cloud adoption, teaching engineering fundamentals, co-designing workflows, and establishing practices that scale as the organization grows.
CloudKite helped us go from zero to one. You taught us best practices, helped us design our cloud architecture, and worked with us to mature as an engineering organization.
Brian Chase
Vice President of Baseball Systems, Marlins
The Solution
A High-Level Overview
CloudKite partnered with the Marlins to lay the groundwork for a modern data and ML organization. Guided by CloudKite’s best practices, the collaboration focused on scalable architecture, mature engineering practices, and ensuring secure, reliable workflows.
Establishing a modern cloud-first architecture
CloudKite engaged in a comprehensive discovery and planning phase with the Marlins’ engineering leadership and technical staff. This initial collaboration was crucial to a deep understanding of the multifaceted challenges presented by the existing on-premise infrastructure, which was experiencing bottlenecks, scalability issues, and high maintenance overhead. Simultaneously, the focus was on clearly defining the Organization’s strategic goals for a complete and successful migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This involved mapping desired outcomes for performance improvement, enhanced data analytics capabilities, greater operational agility, cost optimization, and establishing a future-proof, highly available, and resilient cloud environment.
Building the ML and data foundation from scratch
The Miami Marlins entered the 2025 season facing a critical technology gap. The foundational infrastructure and standardized processes required for modern, scalable Machine Learning (ML) operations were entirely absent. As a result, any data science initiative would be ad-hoc, slow, and prone to failure when transitioning from experimental models to production environments.
Recognizing this operational bottleneck, CloudKite was engaged to fundamentally transform the team’s data capabilities. CloudKite did not merely introduce isolated tools; they architected and deployed a comprehensive, end-to-end MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) system. This involved establishing clear, documented standards for everything from data governance and model development lifecycle to code repository structure and deployment practices.
Crucially, CloudKite automated the entire ML workflow. Tools like Airflow and ArgoCD ran on Kubernetes, were fully integrated with GitHub and were backed by SSO connected to Google Workspace. This included automated data ingestion pipelines, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) for model training and deployment, and real-time automated monitoring systems to track model performance drift and data quality. This automation ensures reliability and rapid iteration.
Finally, CloudKite built the necessary cloud-native infrastructure and safely deployed it using Terraform. This secure, scalable foundation delivered computational power and storage required for large-scale data processing and complex model training demand. CloudKite also set up dedicated environments for development, staging, and production. In essence, CloudKite transformed the Marlins’ approach to analytics from a disparate collection of individual efforts into a professional, integrated, and reliable ML operations practice.
Engineering maturity & best practices
- Adopt an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) methodology.
- Cultivate robust DevOps practices.
- Ensure standardized development and deployment environments.
- Prioritize strong operational hygiene and comprehensive observability.
“CloudKite has been essential on our cloud journey. You helped us scale, taught us best practices, and made it possible for our team to operate like a true engineering organization.”
Results and Impact
Redefining What's Possible
By modernizing their data and engineering foundation, the Marlins transformed how their R&D team operates. Routine maintenance dropped from nearly half of each engineer’s week to less than ten percent, freeing time for meaningful innovation. With standardized workflows, cloud-first architecture, and 50+ machine-learning models in production, the organization now moves faster, forecasts smarter, and builds with confidence.
%
Reduction in Maintenance Time
Engineers regained nearly a full workday, allowing them to focus on core tasks such as baseball analysis, forecasting, and developing internal tools.
“If we’re spending 40% of our time on maintenance, we’re not being as impactful to putting the best team on the field. CloudKite changed that.”
Minutes or Less to Onboard
The new, automated onboarding and access system delivers a significant win. The workflows are now standardized, predictable, and secure, offering least-privilege access, MFA, and automated reviews. Time required has dropped from days to hours, boosting productivity and reducing risk. This framework has elevated a slow, vulnerable process into a strategic, reliable, high-velocity function.
With standardized roles and permissions, new hires are productive on Day One.
“Adding a new employee took me less than 30 minutes. CloudKite’s IAM structure made onboarding easy and safe.”
50+ ML Models Deployed in 2025
And that was only possible because the entire ML pipeline was built and operationalized during the season.
Greater Focus and Specialization
With operational overhead significantly reduced, analysts and engineers can concentrate on the work that matters most.
Focus is restored: Analysts and engineers can now concentrate on their core work.
Specialization thrives: Specialists have the necessary capacity to dedicate themselves to the work that they are good at.
Efficiency increases: Engineers spend far less time on routine support activities.
Innovation accelerates: More capacity is freed up for new insights, improvements, and innovation.
Better Insights, Faster Forecasting
CloudKite’s modernization enabled faster experimentation, more reliable forecasting, and a smoother path from idea to insight.
“The impact is simple: we can move faster, build more, and generate better insights.”
Cultural Change
A New Era of Collaboration
The Marlins and CloudKite partnership was pivotal in rapidly scaling the R&D organization. Together, they established the core of a modern engineering team, creating a robust foundation for sustained growth:
Engineering Excellence:
Instituting mature engineering practices and clear team ownership.
Scalable Infrastructure:
Developing a strong cloud and DevOps foundation with infrastructure designed for organizational growth.
Organizational Clarity:
Creating clarity and consistency across all workflows and systems.
Looking Ahead
Expanding R&D capabilities enables the Marlins to drive data-driven innovation in baseball operations. With CloudKite, the team gains faster experimentation, stronger forecasting, more robust internal tools, and a scalable data ecosystem. This foundation is vital and positions the Marlins to enhance performance, inform decisions, and shape the future in baseball.
CloudKite is the Marlins’ strategic partner, delivering the data foundation for their next season of innovation and continued success.
Technologies Used
