As an online gaming pioneer, innovation is at the heart of everything this company does.
At-a-Glance
Not only did the global pandemic prompt a shift to mass remote working, but it also saw millions flock to digital content in a bid to stay entertained during lockdown. As a result, the lucrative online betting and gaming markets have flourished. Gaming companies have been confronted with rapidly growing user numbers and a demand for innovative new features. In order to meet this demand, and to better prime itself for future growth, a gaming platform pioneer is working with Kubernetes and Rancher Prime.
The journey to Kubernetes and Rancher Prime
As an online gaming pioneer, innovation is at the heart of everything this company does. For many years, however, the company’s ability to innovate at speed was held back by outdated legacy infrastructure that relied heavily on manual processes. The organization was running its infrastructure in stateless services, which meant in order to ensure high-availability – a crucial component of any online gaming platform – it had to go through the time-consuming task of replicating services in different nodes. Not only did this hamper its ability to move at pace, but it often also resulted in human error and unhappy developers.
It quickly realized that it needed to update its technology stack, and in September 2019, the company decided that containers were the obvious choice due to the agility, scalability and portability they would bring to the business. Soon after, the company started POCs with three different Kubernetes management companies, and after review, it quickly opted to work with Rancher Prime.
As explained by the operations director, after many years working in the banking industry, the decision was an easy one. “Rancher Prime already had deep experience with Kubernetes where we did not. The team provided us with this muchneeded expertise, and a highly professional service,” he says. “They responded quickly to our requests and gave us very high confidence in the products we required, in the timelines we needed”.
The reliability and reputation of Rancher Prime were also key to the gaming company’s decision; since it started implementing containers in February 2020, the company hasn’t experienced any issues, despite undertaking several major projects. For example, it has started deploying its Transactions System, which handles all of its clients’ bid placements, deposits and withdrawals, under Kubernetes for its older clients. Previously, mission-critical services were in .NET applications.
“With Kubernetes, we just have to take care of the configuration of the cluster. It’s like a managed service, and now we have to invest much less time”, the operations director adds.
“Rancher Prime already had deep experience with Kubernetes where we did not. The team provided us with this much-needed expertise, and a highly professional service.”
Modernization to drive efficiencies
With legacy infrastructure holding it back, the gaming company was keen to modernize in order to drive efficiencies across the business. By adopting Kubernetes and ridding itself of time-consuming manual processes in favor of automation the team is already starting to reap the benefits.
Even in the early stages of its Kubernetes migration, the gaming company could quickly see a huge improvement in deployment times. When working with Rancher Prime, deployment times were boosted even further. Development teams are now able to deploy a new application version in just 15-20 minutes – an 80% improvement compared to the previous hour-long process.
The automated nature of the Rancher Prime platform means the company has also seen a huge reduction in human error, which has improved resilience overall. What’s more, by adopting Kubernetes and Rancher Prime, the company has found it attracts more talent to the business – which has helped to boost morale within current teams.
“Developers are interested in new technologies, and all of them want to get more involved,” the operations director says. “Everyone wants to progress in their professional lives, so of course we have to progress with the technology we use. We can’t be seen as old-fashioned.”
Results
Driving scale
The gaming company has seen impressive growth, both as a result of an acquisition, and the growing popularity of online gaming services as a result of the global pandemic. The company sees its adoption of Kubernetes and the Rancher Prime platform as an opportunity to further increase the number of customers using its platform.
The company’s Kubernetes deployment started with a bang – the team started by migrating one of its largest clients to the new container platform. This migration went so smoothly, the company now plans to deploy Kubernetes across all of its clients.
While legacy client migration is an important part of the company’s roadmap, the company’s main priority is, of course, increasing its number of clients. With that in mind, the company wants to further expand internationally, particularly in the United States. With Rancher Prime, this is no longer a labor-intensive process: its development teams can easily replicate clusters, configure them for local needs, and simply spin them up. Previously, using its legacy infrastructure, it had to replicate the environment manually every time it bought on a new client or project.
The team can scale much more rapidly with Rancher Prime, too. If the gaming company sees a sudden surge in activity, it can scale at the push of a button.
Hybrid heterogeneous approach
Because the gaming company’s customer base is so large and dispersed, the technology stack has been designed with differing geographical requirements, and legislation, in mind. The team might need to provide on-premises hardware in Norway, private cloud services in Switzerland, and a mix of hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments elsewhere. As such, the company has pioneered a highly flexible hybrid on-premise and mixed cloud environment. By offering a hybrid multi-cloud environment, the team ensures it has the kind of flexibility needed to cater to each customer’s individual needs.
By working with Rancher Prime, the gaming company can easily build workflows for applications that run between on-premises and cloud environments, enabling the smooth operation of almost any hybrid environment, and it’s also able to unify how it interacts with any cloud provider – crucial as the move towards multi-cloud deployments hastens.
Another major benefit of the platform is the fact that the company can use a mix of proprietary and open source technologies side-by-side. This is ideal for the gaming company, which relies on a combination of open source and proprietary solutions in its technology stack.