Why Event-Driven Architecture Is Transforming iGaming
The world of online gaming has changed dramatically over the past few years. With so many people turning to the world of online games for entertainment, the industry continues to grow at a rapid rate. However, with this growth comes challenges for the industry’s technology teams and engineering departments.
In response to these challenges, many companies that work within the iGaming industry are turning to event-driven architecture to enhance their platform performance and flexibility.
What Is Event-Driven Architecture?
In its simplest form, event-driven architecture is a software design in which systems communicate by publishing and consuming events.
Events represent important occurrences within the system.
Examples of such events may include:
A visitor clicks on a link from an affiliate marketer
A visitor successfully registers for the platform
The visitor completes their first deposit
The platform activates a bonus for the new player
A campaign reaches its budget
A traffic rule is triggered
Rather than creating a communication loop between each individual application within the company’s technology stack, event-driven architecture allows the systems to interact independently with each other.
Why Traditional Architectures Struggle
In a traditional application architecture, each system must directly communicate with the next in the platform to ensure that any actions successfully occur.
For instance, when a player registers on the site:
The registration service must directly communicate with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to register the player
The CRM system will then communicate with the analytics software for the site
The analytics platform communicates with the affiliate platform
The affiliate platform can then update the player’s commission
Any failure in one step creates a cascade of failures down the line. In addition, as more players arrive at the site, each of these systems becomes a point of potential bottlenecking for the user registration process.
Decoupling Services
By utilizing event-driven engineering principles, the systems within the platform no longer need to directly communicate with one another. Each service is responsible for its own processes.
The benefits of decoupling the services and applications include the ability for:
Faster development of features
Easier maintenance of individual services
Each service can fail independently of the others
Each service can be scaled according to need
Engineering teams can make changes to individual systems without impacting the others.
Real-Time Affiliate Tracking
Another benefit to event-driven architecture in the world of affiliate marketing is the ability to track affiliates in near-real time.
Each of the following events can be processed by the system in near-real time:
Number of clicks on affiliate links
Number of registrations from those clicks
Number of completed deposits
Changes to affiliate commissions
Revenue brought in by each affiliate
Publishers and operators can more easily track affiliate marketing campaigns as a result.
Smarter Traffic Routing
With event-driven technology, traffic can be more intelligently routed to the appropriate destination on the website.
For instance, as a visitor lands on the website, the traffic routing systems can analyze the visitor’s:
Geographic location
Device type
Browser language
Available operators
Traffic campaigns
As a result, the visitor can be intelligently routed to the operator that best suits their browsing behavior.
Better Scalability
Since traffic volumes to these websites can be extremely high, especially during major sporting events, event-driven systems allow for an individual’s services to process events independently of the others.
The benefits for traffic-heavy companies include:
Ability to quickly add new servers to the platform
Ability to handle increased traffic volumes
Reduced delays in processing visitors’ entries
Scalability allows platforms to handle spikes in traffic without introducing delays for visitors.
Improve Reliability
Events also allow for systems to fail independently of one another.
For example, even if one service fails or is temporarily unavailable, the others will continue to operate. Once the failed system is back online, processing of events will automatically continue.
Failures in one area of a platform will not impact others, increasing reliability.
Faster Product Development
Engineering departments can roll out new features very quickly through event-driven architecture because the features will simply have to “listen” for specific events rather than directly interact with other existing systems.
New features that can subscribe to existing events may include:
Fraud detection systems
Traffic scoring systems
Compliance systems
Customer notification software
Reporting dashboards
As a result, companies can roll out new features more rapidly.
Automate Business Processes
Event-driven systems allow for many business processes to be automated.
For example, processes like:
Sending welcome emails
Calculating affiliate commissions
Updating customer records in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform
Generating reports
Launching social media retention campaigns
can all be automated, saving the company from having to perform these steps manually.
Improve Customer Experience
As more companies race to offer the best player experience, event-driven systems allow for improvements to these processes.
For example, companies can enhance the experience for players by increasing:
Registration speed
Deposit confirmation time
Bonus activation time
Time to deliver notifications to players
Time to update player accounts
Reducing delays between players’ actions and the system’s responses can elevate the player experience.
Simplify Platform Integrations
As iGaming websites rely on a variety of external technology providers, event-driven architecture makes for more efficient integrations.
For instance, the system can more efficiently integrate with services like:
Payment software providers
Identity verification software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software
Analytics software platforms
Marketing automation platforms
Affiliate software systems
By subscribing to the events of other platforms, new services can seamlessly integrate without the company having to create complex integration processes.
Compliance systems also benefit from the implementation of event-driven architecture because:
The platform can automatically respond to instances of players entering a restricted jurisdiction
The platform can detect when a player has reached a responsible gambling time threshold
The platform can reject entries that fail identity verification
The platform can detect instances of suspicious user activity
Event-driven systems ensure that the company can respond to these challenges in near-real time, reducing regulatory risks to the company.
Event-driven systems also allow companies to easily monitor the health of their platforms. Engineering teams can observe the platforms’ performance by analyzing metrics like:
Processing of events within the system
Number of events that failed to be processed
Number of events queued up for processing
Availability of each system
Traffic to the website
These observations will allow engineering teams to troubleshoot any issues with the platform more effectively.
Challenges to Consider
While the event-driven architecture offers a variety of benefits, there are a few challenges that engineering departments should consider prior to implementation.
Some of the most important challenges include:
How will the system order events from different services?
What systems will handle duplicate events?
How will the system maintain data consistency across services?
How will the company monitor the platform?
How will events be stored over time?
How will the company ensure the security of the system and data?
Creating strong architectural standards at the beginning will allow teams to avoid these issues once the system is live.
AI and Event-Driven Systems
Artificial intelligence software can enhance event-driven systems even further.
Integrating AI into event-driven software systems can allow platforms to detect events like:
Fraud on the platform
Players who may leave the site (churn)
Issues with the platform’s infrastructure
Artificial intelligence algorithms can analyze the platform and respond to events as they occur.
Best Practices
Engineering departments that are implementing event-driven architecture should follow a few different best practices.
These include:
Ensuring that events are kept small and meaningful
Carefully versioning the events that are published
Ensuring that system failures are considered in the software design
Monitoring message queues for events
Securing the event-driven architecture
Documenting which events are published by which services
Automating testing procedures to ensure quality of software updates
Creating idempotent consumers of events to allow errors to be safely corrected
Following these steps will create a more reliable system that can scale according to the company’s growing demands.
The Future of iGaming Engineering
As more companies expand their companies’ presence internationally, their use of event-driven systems will become even more common.
Some of the future developments in this industry will include the ability for platforms to:
Personalize the user experience based on user activities
Automate traffic routing without human intervention
Implement AI to enhance event processing
Streamline events closer to the players (at the edge of the network)
Predict the demands on the infrastructure and proactively scale according to those predictions
Adopting event-driven engineering practices today will make a company better prepared to face the future of the industry.
Final Thoughts
For the iGaming industry, event-driven architecture is a game-changing innovation in engineering practices.
By allowing platforms to communicate based on real-time events instead of having services directly communicate with each other, event-driven architectures allow companies to become more scalable, deliver better performance, and build more resilient platforms.
Companies such as operators, affiliates, publishers, and technology providers will benefit from a flexible platform that can easily adapt to increased traffic volumes, new integrations, and a variety of other demands.
As real-time interactions between platform and users become the industry standard in the future, event-driven architecture will play a critical role in the evolution of the iGaming industry’s technology.