Innovation in the Online Casino Industry: the Unibo Story.
Unibo is a pioneer in the online casino industry, on a mission to boost player engagement through an innovative suite of gamification and promotional tools. The platform is designed to be game and platform agnostic, enabling unmatched flexibility in campaign management and player interaction.
Services Used:
Client:
Unibo
Industry:
Media & Entertainment
SaaS
Technologies:
AWS
Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
Terraform
Ansible
InfluxDB
Grafana
Business Challenge
Our collaboration with Unibo was born from a shared vision to revolutionise the online casino industry. We were brought in as infrastructure experts to support the client in building an innovative system from the ground up. The iGaming market is highly dynamic and comes with extremely rigorous requirements, making every such project a leap into the deep end. To turn Unibo’s ambitious plans into a working product, we had to define and overcome four key barriers from the very start:
Building solid and replicable digital foundations:
The need to create a reliable base infrastructure that is universal and stable enough to allow processes to be easily and accurately replicated.
Seamless IT Environment Replication:
Designing an ecosystem capable of rapidly and precisely replicating test and production environments, which is essential for the safe deployment of new features.
Guaranteeing consistency, reliability and scalability:
Maintaining high performance and fault-free operation for the online casino industry, while preparing the system for dynamic growth and increasing workloads.
Delivering personalized solutions at scale:
The ability to flexibly adapt services to the unique requirements of each client (regardless of their size or location), without slowing down implementation processes.
Thanks to this collaboration, we gained an infrastructure that keeps up with our ambitions 100%. The ability to replicate environments instantly allowed us to grow effortlessly and serve a global clientele. The system simply works, and we can focus on innovation and product development.
CEO / Founder
Alexis Wicen
UNIBO
Building a Replicable and Scalable Ecosystem
To meet this challenge, we embarked on a journey of innovation and strategic planning, focusing on creating a flexible yet robust infrastructure. Our approach was built on the following key strategies and technologies:
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform: This allowed us to define and manage infrastructure through code, enabling precise and rapid replication of environments for testing and production purposes.
Prefect for automation: We used Prefect to automate workflow orchestration, ensuring that environment configuration and management were both efficient and error-free.
Amazon S3: Chosen for its robustness in storing static files, ensuring data security and availability across environments.
Auto-scaling Groups (ASG): Deployed to dynamically adjust compute resources in response to real-time user demand, optimising both cost and performance.
Elastic Container Registry (ECR): Used to store custom microservice images, facilitating their deployment across different environments.
CodeDeploy and CodePipelines: These services streamlined the deployment process, enabling smooth platform updates and maintenance.
Databases with RDS for PostgreSQL and OpenSearch Service: Selected for their reliability and scalability, forming the backbone of the platform’s data management capabilities.
A New Paradigm of Flexibility and Growth
The results of this collaboration proved transformative, ushering Unibo into a new era of operational excellence and market agility:
Key Results:
less time needed to deploy a new environment
By leveraging Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and automation, the process of provisioning infrastructure for a new client has been minimized, accelerating time-to-market.
environments supported without increasing operational team resources
Transforming flexible architecture into real business success – rapid expansion from a few to over 20 environments, providing each new client with a tailored solution in record time.
Observability and Operational Management
To further ensure the reliability and performance of Unibo’s innovative platform, we implemented a comprehensive observability and operational management strategy. This approach focused on maintaining full visibility into system performance, streamlining incident response, and continuously improving platform resilience. Key components included:
Monitoring with InfluxDB and Grafana: We integrated InfluxDB for metrics collection and Grafana for visualisation. This combination provided detailed insight into system performance, helping to proactively address potential bottlenecks and optimise resource allocation.
AWS Managed Services Monitoring with CloudWatch: Carefully selected metrics for alarms gave us visibility into managed services such as AWS RDS, ELB, and EC2.
Continuous performance testing: Performance tests were conducted regularly to ensure the platform could handle variable loads and maintain optimal performance. This practice helped identify performance issues before they could impact end users.
Configuration management with Ansible: We used 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 implementing these observability and operational management practices, we ensured that the Unibo platform remains robust, agile, and capable of supporting its rapid growth and commitment to innovation in the online casino industry.
