Powered by AWS serverless, this leading igaming platform now loads 25% faster—with zero downtime.

The gaming industry is experiencing unprecedented growth, demanding infrastructure that can scale effortlessly, guarantee high availability, and incorporate cutting-edge technologies like AI and machine learning. However, legacy hosting environments often struggle to meet these demands, leading to scalability issues, performance bottlenecks, and complex operational challenges. 

By embracing the AWS cloud, infrastructure can be smartly modernized, unlocking enhanced performance, greater operational efficiency, and robust security to stay ahead in a highly competitive market.

Customer overview

Founded in 2008, our customer has become a market leader by developing innovative next-generation technology for both regulated and emerging markets, delivering comprehensive solutions to top-tier global brands. Pioneering the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into skill-based gaming, the company continues to push the boundaries of technological innovation.

Challenges | Performance degradation and operational inefficiencies of legacy systems

As the demand for online gaming grew, the client’s legacy infrastructure, hosted on GoDaddy, struggled to keep up with the increasing traffic and performance demands. The system faced multiple challenges that hindered scalability and operational efficiency:

• Scalability restrictions: Their existing infrastructure could not handle fluctuating traffic, leading to performance degradation during peak gaming events, particularly when user activity surged.
• Manual operational overhead: Updates were performed manually, which resulted in delays and increased the risk of errors, negatively affecting user experience and system reliability.
• Monolithic architecture: The monolithic architecture of the platform created performance bottlenecks, causing slow response times, particularly under high traffic loads.
• Lack of monitoring & observability: Without a centralized monitoring and alerting system, it was difficult to identify performance issues and address them in real time, affecting the operational stability of the platform.
• Static asset delivery delays: Without a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), the delivery of static assets like game images, assets, and media was slow, negatively impacting the player experience.
• Integration challenges with emerging technologies: The legacy platform struggled to integrate with newer technologies, such as AI/ML and real-time analytics, limiting innovation opportunities for enhanced player engagement and fraud detection.

Solution | Cloud-native AWS re-architecture for scalability, performance, and security

The solution involved migrating to a cloud-native, serverless architecture on AWS, transforming the existing system into a secure, scalable, and highly automated environment. The migration leveraged AWS best practices to improve performance, ensure high availability, and enhance security across the platform.

By adopting AWS infrastructure, the system was modernized and rehosted, streamlining key application deployments and optimizing backend services for better scalability and performance.

Cloud-optimized infrastructure powered by AWS

The migration to AWS transformed the client's infrastructure by embracing a serverless-first, cloud-native architecture. This solution improved scalability, performance, and security, all while reducing operational overhead.

Key components of the migration included:

• Cloud-optimized infrastructure: A secure and scalable environment was established using Amazon VPC with multi-AZ subnets to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.
• Fault-tolerant application deployment: Applications were deployed on Amazon EC2 with NGINX and Apache, utilizing Auto Scaling and Application Load Balancer (ALB) for effective load balancing and handling traffic spikes.
• Seamless data migration: The database was migrated to Amazon RDS (Multi-AZ), with automated snapshots ensuring zero data loss and maintaining data integrity.
• Proactive monitoring: CloudWatch Dashboards and CloudWatch Alarms were implemented to continuously monitor system performance and provide real-time alerts for quick issue resolution.
• Secure and compliant deployment: AWS IAM roles, Security Groups, and KMS were configured to ensure encrypted data storage and compliance with industry regulations, including data protection frameworks.
• Scalable backend APIs: Using AWS Lambda we re-architected the backend into stateless functions, with API Gateway providing scalable API management, authentication, and logging.
• Optimized frontend hosting: AWS Amplify simplified DevOps for frontend React.js apps, and Amazon S3 + CloudFront delivered static assets globally with low latency and enhanced security.
• Efficient authentication: Amazon Cognito enabled secure user authentication with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and federated identities, integrated with API Gateway and Lambda.
• Application storage: Amazon S3 was used for secure, scalable storage of static content, with encryption and lifecycle policies to manage assets and logs effectively.
• Secrets management: AWS Secrets Manager provided centralized, encrypted storage for sensitive credentials, enabling secure access during runtime with automatic rotation.

Success metrics

This migration helped our customer to scale efficiently, reduce operational overhead, and improve security while ensuring a superior user experience. By migrating to AWS, the platform is now better equipped to handle future growth, integrate new technologies, and maintain high performance in a dynamic gaming environment.

• Zero downtime: The migration was completed with zero downtime, ensuring continuous service and minimal disruption for users.
• 100% feature parity: All features of the previous system were successfully migrated and fully functional in the AWS environment, ensuring no loss of capabilities.
• 25% improvement in response times: Leveraging AWS CloudFront for global content delivery and AWS Lambda for serverless backend execution led to a 25% improvement in system response times.
• 99.9% uptime SLA: The new architecture maintained a 99.9% uptime SLA, ensuring reliable service during peak gaming periods.
• 90% automation in deployment: Over 90% of deployments were automated through AWS CodePipeline, reducing manual intervention and minimizing human errors.