Innovating the online casino landscape: The Unibo story
Challenge: Engineering a foundation for innovation
The partnership between our team and Unibo was born out of a shared vision for revolutionising the online casino industry. Recognised for our expertise in the infrastructural realm, we were enlisted to tackle a pivotal challenge: crafting a robust and replicable digital foundation. Unibo’s ambitious goal was to architect an ecosystem that could seamlessly replicate testing and production environments. This was crucial for maintaining consistency, reliability, and scalability across the board, ensuring that each client, regardless of size or location, received a tailor-made solution that met their unique needs.
Solution: Building a replicable and scalable ecosystem
To address this challenge, we embarked on a journey of innovation and strategic planning, focusing on creating a flexible yet sturdy infrastructure. Our approach hinged on the following key strategies and technologies:
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform: This allowed us to define and manage the infrastructure through code, making it easy to replicate environments for testing and production purposes with precision and speed.
Prefect for automation: We leveraged Prefect to automate the orchestration of workflows, ensuring that the setup and management of environments were both efficient and error-free. Amazon S3: Selected for its robustness in storing static files, ensuring data security and accessibility across environments.
Auto-scaling Groups (ASG): Implemented to dynamically adjust the computing resources in response to real-time user demand, optimizing both cost and performance.
Elastic Container Registry (ECR): Utilized for storing custom microservice images, facilitating easy deployment across different environments.
CodeDeploy and CodePipelines: These services streamlined the deployment process, allowing for smooth updates and maintenance of the platform.
Databases with RDS for PostgreSQL and OpenSearch Service: Chosen for their reliability and scalability, forming the backbone of the platform’s data management capabilities.
Results: A new paradigm of flexibility and growth
The fruits of this collaboration have been transformative, propelling Unibo into a new era of operational excellence and market agility:
Reproducibility and scalability: The infrastructure’s design enables Unibo to quickly replicate environments, ensuring that they can effortlessly scale to accommodate the needs of any client.
Enhanced operational agility: Unibo has gained the ability to swiftly adapt its platform to the evolving demands of the market, seamlessly integrating new technologies as they emerge.
Market expansion: The scalable and replicable nature of the infrastructure has facilitated Unibo’s expansion, growing from a few environments to over twenty, catering to a global clientele.
Focus on innovation: With a reliable and efficient infrastructure in place, Unibo can concentrate on its core mission of enhancing user engagement and expanding its market reach, confident in the knowledge that its technological foundation is solid and future-proof. This collaboration not only solved the initial challenge but also set a new standard for what’s possible in the online gaming industry, demonstrating the transformative power of combining infrastructural expertise with visionary ambition.
Observability and Operations Management Approach
To further ensure the reliability and efficiency of Unibo’s innovative platform, we implemented a comprehensive observability and operations management strategy.
This approach focused on maintaining high visibility into system performance, enhancing incident response, and continuously improving the platform’s resilience. Key components included:
Monitoring with InfluxDB and Grafana: We integrated InfluxDB for metrics collection and Grafana for visualization. This combination provided detailed insights into system performance, helping to proactively address potential bottlenecks and optimize resource allocation.
Monitoring AWS managed services with CloudWatch: Carefully selected metrics for alarms allowed us to have visibility into managed services like AWS RDS, ELB, and EC2.
Continuous Performance Testing: Regular performance testing was conducted to ensure that the platform could handle varying loads and maintain optimal performance. This practice helped in identifying performance issues before they could impact end-users.
Configuration Management with Ansible: We utilised Ansible for configuration management, ensuring consistency across environments and simplifying the deployment of changes. This approach minimised the risk of configuration drift and improved overall system reliability. By incorporating these observability and operations management practices, we ensured that Unibo’s platform remained robust, agile, and capable of supporting its rapid growth and commitment to innovation in the online casino industry.