Background
The client is a sports betting platform with a strong presence in the USA, UK, Australia, Germany, and other regions. The Sportsbook platform serves millions of users globally, with over 100 million bets placed annually through iOS or Android apps or the website. These bets cover a range of sporting and entertainment events, including casinos, poker, arcades, and other types of games.
Challenge
Navigating the U.S. regulatory complexities posed a significant challenge for our client. It was required to adapt the Sportsbook platform to be state-specific compliant across 100+ components. Simultaneously, we had to ensure adherence to local laws governing platform access from different geographical areas.
Another challenge was to gain the agility, scalability, and application performance required to move the core betting application environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Solution
Our customer engaged Gart, a DevOps and AWS cloud migration provider, and hired three engineers to work in its in-house team (AWS Cloud Architect, DevOps, and SRE Engineer).
We configured infrastructure for multiple OpenStack and AWS instances, with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud serving as the foundation for migrating data centers spanning different U.S. states.
We also established dedicated environments to accommodate third-party certification regulators, ensuring compliance with state-specific regulations.
1.Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
To expedite the creation of new infrastructure instances, we implemented the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach.
This approach enabled us to define all necessary components, jobs, pipelines, computations, storage, and network elements in a declarative manner using a concise set of YAML files. IaC not only increased maintainability but also enhanced security by ensuring all changes occurred through code, preventing inadvertent modifications or additions. Moreover, it empowered the development team to swiftly set up additional environments, such as staging or production, when required.
2.Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Deployment
Our team established robust CI/CD pipelines for seamless promotion of component versions from various environments to all states. We leveraged a custom framework developed by the client’s in-house team, capable of deploying software to OpenStack Private Cloud hosted both on-premises and on AWS.
The benefits of this approach included:
- Early detection and resolution of issues through continuous integration.
- Rapid delivery of bug fixes, configuration changes, and new features to bettors via continuous delivery.
- Liberation of the client’s in-house team to focus on strategic tasks, thanks to continuous deployment.
