Building Resilient iGaming Platforms
In the iGaming industry, every second of inavailability incurs a cost. Whether it is due to a failed redirect during a football match, a database failure during a promotion, or payment failures during peak traffic periods, there is the potential for lost registrations and revenue.
iGaming platforms are required to be available 24/7 to cater to the preferences of the industry’s players, affiliates, and operators. The growing competition within the industry has forced engineering teams to go beyond developing fast and efficient platforms to creating systems that can recover from failures.
Resilience has emerged as one of the most valuable engineering principles for online gambling platforms.
What Is Platform Resilience?
Platform resilience is the ability of a system to continue to operate despite the failure of some of its components.
Rather than creating systems that aim to never experience failures in any of its components, engineers design platforms with a focus on creating systems that can recover quickly from failures.
Some of the components of resilient system include:
Automatic server failover
Database replication
Load balancing
Redundant network connections
Backup traffic routing
These systems aim to provide uninterrupted services for users despite the occurrence of unexpected events.
Why Resience Matters in iGaming?
iGaming platforms are required to have high availability to handle spikes in traffic caused by specific events within specific sports or games.
Examples of high traffic periods include:
Football matches
Championship events
Casino tournaments
Promotions
New market launches
Should the infrastructure of a platform not be able to handle these traffic increases, the user experience for the platform will suffer.
Downtime Costs Money
When iGaming platforms are down, businesses lose more than potential visitors.
Lostregistrations
Missed deposits
Gameplay
Affiliate revenue
Player and customer confidence
Support requests
All of these factors have the potential to impact the player’s decision to continue to use a particular platform; they also impact the ability of the company to retain those players.
Design for Failure
One of the most important engineering principles is that failures will happen.
A resilient engineering platform should plan for the following failures:
Hardware
Network
Software
Third-party
Unplanned traffic increases
Planning for these failures ensures that an engineering and operations team can minimize the impact of these failures on the business.
Build Redundancy Into Every Layer of the Platform
Rather than depending upon a single component to perform specific functions for a platform to provide its services, engineers should create redundant platforms and components for each of these tasks.
Examples include:
Multiple application servers
Replicated databases
Backup storage
Second network providers
Distributed infrastructure
Should one component fail, another will be able to perform the same functions.
Use Load Balancing for Even Distribution of Traffic
Traffic to an iGaming website will not be even throughout the 24-hour period.
A load balancer will distribute the traffic even among the available application servers. Benefits of load balancing include:
Better response times from the servers
Improved stability of the iGaming platform
Higher availability of the website
More efficient use of the available resources
Should the demand for a platform increase, additional application servers can be added to the system to redistribute the traffic.
Monitor the performance of all components of an iGaming platform.
Engineering teams must monitor the traffic, the database, response times, application performance, hardware, and network connectivity to ensure that any issues can be resolved before they have the potential to impact the players.
Automate recovery procedures to minimize downtime.
Modern engineering teams automate the recovery of systems in the following ways:
Automatic restart of servers
Self-healing applications and services
Scaling of infrastructure
Health checks of the platform components
Rerouting of traffic
Automating these processes reduces the amount of downtime for a platform.
Third-party applications are often required to operate an iGaming platform.
These may include:
Payment platforms
Identity providers
Affiliate management platforms
Analytics platforms
Email service providers
Engineering and operations teams must account for the possibility of these third parties being unavailable at any time.
Prepare the platform for these outages by creating failover systems and error-handling procedures.
Protect data by ensuring that it is replicated across the platform.
The data of players and the records of financial transactions are some of the most important elements of an iGaming platform.
Data replication protects against the following:
Hardware failures
Storage corruption
Regional outages
Disaster scenarios
Regularly test the disaster recovery plans for a platform.
A disaster recovery plan exists on paper for many engineering teams; however, it should be regularly tested in case studies to ensure that should a failure occur, the team can resolve the issue quickly.
Reduce single points of failure in each component of the system.
Some of the single points of failure include:
Single databases
Single hosting companies
Single payment processors
Single DNS providers
Reducing reliance upon individual services will increase the chance that a platform will be able to continue to provide its services.
Security and resilience are closely linked.
Should a platform experience a security-related issue, it could be down for an extended period.
Engineering and security teams can prevent these issues through the implementation of:
DDoS protection
Firewall management
Multi-factor authentication
Access controls
Vulnerability monitoring
A solid security infrastructure will allow the platform to remain up and available.
Using cloud-based infrastructure for an iGaming platform will provide engineering teams with advantages in terms of platform resilience.
Cloud infrastructure providers offer the following features:
Geographic redundancy
Automatic scaling of resources
Managed data backups
High availability zones
Rapid deployment of platform updates
Using cloud-based engineering will allow for the fastest possible recovery time in the case of any unexpected failures.
Engineering teams must find ways of measuring the reliability of a platform.
Some of the most important metrics to measure include:
System uptime
Recovery time
Response latency
Error frequency
Successful deployment rate
Service availability
These metrics will allow engineers to determine the success of the various engineering and operations procedures for a platform.
Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in the management of the infrastructure for iGaming platforms.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can assist engineers in the following ways:
Predicting hardware failures
Detecting unusual traffic patterns
Making infrastructure recommendations
Identifying performance anomalies
Automating responses to platform issues
AI can dramatically reduce the amount of downtime for an iGaming platform.
The future of engineering for iGaming platforms will include innovations such as:
Self-healing applications
Distributed cloud architecture
Edge computing
Intelligent traffic routing
Predictive infrastructure monitoring
Autonomous operations
All of these innovations will increase the availability of iGaming platforms for their users.
Engineering teams can best prepare their systems for the future of the industry through the implementation of the following practices:
Eliminate single points of failure
Automate infrastructure monitoring
Test disaster recovery plans
Replicate critical data
Monitor platform performance
Prepare for third-party outages
Invest in cloud-native architecture
Document the entire platform’s operational procedures
These practices will enable iGaming companies to create systems that can accommodate the future growth of the industry.
Final Thoughts
Engineering teams in the iGaming industry cannot afford to implement an engineering practice that is optional. Players, affiliates, and operators are expanding into new markets and receiving more traffic than ever before. The ability of an industry and its companies to remain available and reliable from start to finish has become just as important as the performance of their platforms.
By engineering systems that anticipate platform failures and create automations for recoveries from those failures, iGaming companies will find themselves protected from revenue loss, improved relationships with their players and affiliates, and an ability to continue to expand their operations with confidence. In an industry where every action counts, engineering teams that utilize these strategies will find themselves successful in the long term.