Migrating Workloads to AWS for leading online bookmaker
Driving risk reduction, improving efficiency and providing capability uplift.
80% faster
Scaling and recovery times
Modernise
Cevo NexusTM solution
Our customer is Australia’s biggest online corporate bookmaker.
Business challenge
Gaming is a highly competitive industry. To enable our customer to obtain a competitive advantage in the market, and to iterate upon products quicker to attract and keep punters using their platform, the business has adopted an all-in approach to Cloud.
The organisation had been augmenting its environment into AWS in a very ad hoc, bespoke and not overly secure manner. They committed to an all-in cloud migration which included:
- Building new AWS infrastructure in an automated repeatable and secure fashion
- Migrate applications from legacy AWS accounts into the new infrastructure using the new patterns designed
- Migrate applications from on-prem into new infrastructure using the new patterns designed.
These patterns aim to:
- Improve the security posture of the infrastructure in AWS
- Reduce the running costs of the infrastructure by implementing appropriate scaling
- Improve business agility in highly competitive business segment.
Solution
Cevo’s skills and capability within AWS were engaged to help our customer migrate their workloads, specifically:
- Cloud skills and capacity uplift within the delivery teams
- Develop patterns for build, package, deployment, logging, monitoring and alerting for new and existing applications in AWS
- Migration of existing workloads into AWS using the defined patterns
- Assist with new builds into AWS using the defined patterns
The framework for migration of applications consisted of four key phases that needed to be undertaken and completed:
Phase 1
- Baseline existing on-prem performance and health by introducing Introduce application performance monitoring into the op-prem solution
Phase 2
- Design, build and implement the appropriate solution for the application within AWS. This consists of:
- Using AWS services (for instance SQLSERVER RDS instead of a self-managed SQLSERVER) when appropriate
- Minor application refactor to support immutable ephemeral solutions, particularly around how application configuration is managed
- Implement secure a password manager solution for database passwords
- Introduce ‘observability’ by adding tools to be able to diagnose issues without needing to ‘log onto the box’
- Minor to major application uplift depending on the business criticality and longevity of the application
Phase 3
- Cut over to the new solution
Phase 4
- Decommission the old solution
During the migration process, Cevo implemented changes to the application toolchain including:
- Introduction of immutable and ephemeral application servers away from domain joined Windows hosts
- Changed the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery solutions of Bamboo & Octopus deploy to Jenkins with native CloudFormation.
- Changed the database technology from InfomixDB to Aurora MySQL RDS
- Implemented ‘observability’ application performance monitoring using NewRelic APM, NewRelic Synthetics and SumoLogic
- Implemented business SLAs via CloudWatch, NewRelic and PagerDuty
Outcomes
This project allowed our customer to realise a number of significant benefits around efficiencies, risk reduction and capability uplift:
- Prior to this migration, manual intervention was required to manually scale infrastructure relative to key gaming events – now they can leverage AutoScaling to scale upon demand
- Scaling and recovery times for an application server has gone from 30 minutes down to 5 minutes
- Changes to application code can be deployed via Jenkins all-the-way to production within 30 minutes
- The trust in the running application is greatly improved by using the exact same application code, version and topology throughout all environments. If there is a production problem, a first option is to kill that instance knowing another will immediately start up
- With the introduction of Observability, they now have a deep understanding of the application performance of the solution
- The solution has been designed to be easily replicable for other sports that have the same betting options.
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