Finnish worldwide gaming firm PAF has partnered with Sumo Logic in an formidable challenge emigrate its software stack onto the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud. This will allow PAF to scale up considerably to fulfill future calls for.
For PAF, the migration-to-cloud enterprise solutions the necessity for a cost-efficient strategy to handle the corporate’s more and more distributed structure. Sumo Logic’s expertise is vital to PAF’s imaginative and prescient of a seamless and easy transition to the cloud.
The transfer consolidates PAF’s present instruments, enabling the corporate to function on-premise and in AWS with centralised monitoring.
Ewan Maley, lead architect at PAF, stated the challenge concerned cautious planning and preparation that integrated progress evaluations coupled with a imaginative and prescient for shifting to the cloud.
“That lead-in period set out the benefits we would get from migrating,” he stated. “There were some initial proofs of concept conducted to assess viability before moving on to the migration itself.”
Scalability emerged as a significant difficulty for PAF, stated Maley. “One of the biggest drivers for the cloud is scalability. In a monolith, if we wanted to scale one single component, the whole stack had to be scaled vertically, resulting in large infrastructure overheads with low utilisation. With the cloud, you have the ability to scale just one part of the system on an as-needed basis and harness the benefits.”
Mariehamn-headquartered PAF is owned by the Åland Islands regional authorities. Administering an archipelago comprising greater than 6,700 islands, Åland is an autonomous Swedish-speaking province of Finland situated on the southern finish of the Gulf of Bothnia between mainland Finland and Sweden.
Founded in 1966 as Penningautomatförening, PAF has its personal gaming growth studio and a community of workplaces throughout Europe. It was established by Åland authorities to contribute a part of its income to good causes, together with coastguard providers, historic websites and sports activities actions.
PAF generates its core income from its 400 on-line video games, which embrace slots, on line casino, poker, betting, bingo and lotteries.
The firm additionally runs a worthwhile bodily gaming enterprise comprising 1,500 slot machines and 55 gaming tables on cruise ships working within the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and on Åland. In 2017, PAF reported an working revenue of €27.6m on complete revenues of €116.5m, and transferred €18m from its income to the regional authorities for “good cause” ventures.
Priority and bandwidth proved to be a major problem for PAF when migrating from on-premise to the cloud, stated Lars-Göran Hakamo, the agency’s lead safety architect. “We can’t shut up shop just to get a big migration done, so we opted for incremental steps, onboarding a few teams at a time,” he stated. “This also allows us to continuously improve as we go along.”
Another main problem was PAF’s accountable gaming enterprise mannequin, however the cloud migration will improve the corporate’s skill to function in a regulated market, stated Hakamo.
“The fact that providers such as AWS [Amazon Web Services] and Sumo Logic have gone through various certifications makes it a lot easier for us,” he stated. “Being able to show those certifications for the purposes of various country audits helps us on the regulation side of things.”
Partnering with Sumo Logic, which had the capability to ship automated software-as-a-service techniques to buttress PAF’s hybrid infrastructure for the migration to cloud, helped DevOps groups to maneuver extra shortly and help safety and compliance rules such because the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
“In the decoupling of services and working with sustainable architecture, we wanted each of the development teams to be autonomous, and to use as much self-service and automation as possible,” stated Hakamo. “Due to the rapid development and deployment of the process we now have, we need to have visibility and observability of those services, and of the infrastructure that we are now putting into AWS.”
Cost-efficiency and scale-functionality necessities had been different challenges to beat in each the lead-in and course of design phases, stated Maley.
“We needed to scale the whole thing, and upgrade every part, even if it was only one part that required it,” he stated. “This meant a lot of resource wastage, and a lot of extras added. From the perspective of a payback, the cloud provides the ability to ramp down your own hardware, resulting in cost savings.”
The cloud migration will strengthen PAF’s skill to develop the variety of video games it provides to prospects, utilizing performance that it didn’t have beforehand, stated Maley.
“One of the motivating reasons for moving to the cloud was to give us an improved ability to be faster to market,” he stated. “With the coupled nature of the monolith, we had been fairly sluggish to have the ability to ship new video games and ship new performance, whether or not it involved our accountable gaming necessities, or totally different workflows that we wished to implement.
“We were quite slow in being able to do that. Now that we have moved to more distributed and independent components, we are a lot faster in getting that functionality out there and in use, as well as the number of gaming offerings.”
Paved path enterprise mannequin
PAF’s cloud migration may also enhance its capability to realize the “paved path” enterprise mannequin championed by Netflix, which promotes applied sciences that produce enterprise worth.
“By bringing these technologies on, you get them to a mature state and make them generally available for the rest of the company to use,” stated Maley. “We can begin to develop our technical stack, however in a really maintained, manageable method.
“If we took on everything that AWS offers from the get-go, we could quite easily end up in a minefield where we don’t actually know what technologies are being used. We don’t have the knowledge or resources in-house to be able to support every service that AWS provides.”
PAF’s migration to cloud may also convey benefits within the space of regulation, such because the GDPR, stated Maley.
“GDPR affects everybody in Europe,” he stated. “Having the expertise in place to allow you to ship these options extra shortly signifies that the extra versatile your expertise is, the extra succesful you’re, as an organization, to adapt to those new rules and certifications, if required.
“Looking at technology over the next five years, I would say it is a question of being as nimble as possible with your whole stack.”