Building Scalable iGaming Infrastructure for Growth
While great marketing and offers will get you some traffic, there’s another key component to consider: engineering. Behind every great affiliate platform or casino is an engineering infrastructure that can handle millions of requests a day.
As iGaming companies grow and expand into new markets, their engineering infrastructure must be able to keep up with increasing traffic volumes. What may work well for a platform that sees 10,000 visitors a day can fall short if the traffic increases tenfold.
Scalable engineering allows companies to grow their iGaming platforms without sacrificing the infrastructure’s performance or the player experience.
Why Infrastructure Matters for iGaming Companies
Every visitor to your iGaming platform will have specific expectations of your platform’s performance. They want your offers to load quickly and your registration systems to accept their information.
If your infrastructure cannot deliver on these promises, visitors will leave your site without ever making a deposit.
Strong infrastructure will support every stage of the visitor’s journey on your site, from landing on your pages to making a deposit and beyond.
Good infrastructure will ensure that your marketing budget and efforts bear significantly more fruit.
What Makes an iGaming Platform Scalable?
A platform that can handle an influx of visitors without sacrificing its performance or speed is a scalable iGaming platform. Such a platform is required to support high-traffic periods such as:
Major sporting events
Promotions
Affiliate traffic
New markets
Marketing campaigns
A scalable iGaming infrastructure allows companies to add new features and functionalities without having to rebuild their platforms every time.
Cloud-Native Architecture for iGaming
Many iGaming companies have moved away from on-premise infrastructure to cloud-native solutions that offer significant advantages over on-premise data centers.
Elastic Scaling
Cloud infrastructure allows engineering teams to adjust the computing power of their systems based on the traffic volumes they experience.
Benefits of elastic computing include:
Maintaining high levels of platform performance
Minimizing system downtime
Reducing infrastructure and hosting costs
Enabling fast system deployments
The ability to increase the computing power of a system during peak hours and decrease that power when the traffic volume drops is a key benefit of cloud-native systems.
Geographic Distribution
Since iGaming websites are accessed from multiple regions of the world, geographic distribution allows servers to be hosted closer to the visitors.
This significantly reduces the latency between the user and the server and results in faster websites. Faster websites will allow publishers to convert more visitors to customers.
High Availability Systems
Downtime results in lost revenue. If a website goes live during a major sporting event, losing access to the site will mean losing potential deposits from that sporting event.
High availability systems ensure the platform is always online and accessible. Some of the most common methods to ensure high availability for iGaming websites include:
Using multiple application servers
Using replicated databases
Using failover systems
Using load balancers
Using distributed databases and storage
All of these ensure high availability and can significantly reduce platform downtime.
Load Balancing
When visitors access a website, the site’s server handles those requests. However, if the traffic volume increases to such high numbers that the server becomes overwhelmed, the visitors may experience high response times or even 503 errors.
A load balancer distributes those incoming requests across multiple servers to ensure no single server gets overwhelmed with requests.
Benefits of using a load balancer include:
Providing faster response times to the visitors
Increasing the overall reliability of the website
Maximizing the utilization of the data center’s computing resources
Avoiding infrastructure bottlenecks
As the traffic volume increases, engineering teams can simply add more servers to the system to handle the increased volume of website visitors.
Database Performance
The database contains all the information for an iGaming website. Operators have to process information such as all player accounts, all affiliate activity, all transactions, all game bonuses, and platform analytics and tracking reports.
If the database is not performing efficiently, it will cause delays for all other aspects of the website.
Engineering teams can optimize databases through methods such as creating database indexes, implementing database caching, and database replication to increase the database’s efficiency.
Caching increases the platform’s speed by ensuring that users are not performing database queries that have already been performed and stored.
Caching can store information such as landing pages, static assets, game listings, and operator reviews.
For publishers who rely on strong SEO efforts, having a platform that can load faster will significantly improve their search engine performance.
API-First Development
iGaming platforms rely on APIs to integrate with external services and websites such as payment providers, identity verification services, affiliate platforms, CRMs, analytics providers, and marketing automation platforms.
An API-first development strategy allows engineering teams to build systems and features that make these integrations as easy as possible.
Using APIs will significantly improve the flexibility of an iGaming platform and reduce engineering complexities.
Monitoring Platform Health
Engineering teams must monitor the health of their websites to ensure that they are performing optimally. Key metrics to monitor include:
Server utilization
Response times
Error rates
Database performance
API availability and response times
Queue processing times
Monitoring the health of a website in real time ensures that engineering and operational teams can react to any problems before visitors begin to notice them.
Engineering for Security
For iGaming companies, security is a fundamental requirement. All of the information shared on these platforms is sensitive and should be protected.
Such information includes all personal information, payment information, identity verification documents, and financial transactions.
Engineering teams protect this data by using processes and tools such as data encryption, secure user authentication, multi-factor authentication, firewall protection, and vulnerability scanning.
Engineering for security ensures that iGaming companies do not suffer data breaches or other security incidences.
Building Reliable Tracking Systems for Affiliates
For affiliate platforms, engineering teams have to develop reliable systems that track all aspects of user activity that lead to deposits.
Such information tracked includes the number of clicks on the affiliate links, the number of users who registered with these platforms, the number of users who deposited money, and the revenue brought in by these players.
Building reliable systems ensures that affiliates receive the accurate reports of the revenue they are entitled to.
Automation to Improve Operational Efficiency
As iGaming platforms grow, the need for engineering to automate certain operational tasks increases.
Some tasks that can be automated include routing website traffic, system deployments, system health monitoring, data backup management, alerting teams of system issues, and creating compliance reports.
Automating operations will significantly improve the efficiency of the engineering department.
Preparing for Traffic Spikes
Traffic to many iGaming websites is not consistent. During major sporting events, jackpot promotions, and new product launches, traffic can increase to ten times the normal volume.
Engineering teams can prepare for these traffic spikes by planning the website’s capacity needs, stress testing the site, auto-scaling their infrastructure to support more visitors, and preparing a disaster recovery plan to deal with platform outages caused by high traffic volumes.
Engineering for Compliance
Depending on the region from which their players originate, iGaming companies may face regulation requirements on certain website data and functions.
Many engineering systems contain features that prepare their platforms for regulatory compliance, such as audit logs, consent management for cookies and analytics, secure document storage, data retention policies, and regional hosting requirements.
Engineering for compliance ensures that the companies do not face regulatory issues.
The Growing Role of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence has become an increasing value for engineering departments in the iGaming space.
Some of the ways in which AI can play a role in iGaming operations and engineering include automation to optimize infrastructure, predictive scaling of servers, fraud detection systems, performance monitoring tools, and user behavior analytics.
Artificial intelligence allows engineering departments to proactively respond to common issues rather than reacting when they occur.
Future Engineering Trends
The future of iGaming platform engineering will include an increasing focus on utilizing emerging technologies in their engineering systems.
Some of the latest technologies already being utilized in iGaming include serverless computing, edge computing, container orchestration, event-driven architecture, AI-assisted operations, and real-time personalization.
Adopting these engineering trends will significantly improve a company’s scalability and reduce its operational costs.
Final Thoughts
Scalable engineering is one of the most important investments an iGaming business can make. From user experience to system reliability, an iGaming platform’s engineering infrastructure supports every aspect of the visitor’s experience.
As the demand for iGaming services and the regulatory environment grow more demanding, companies will need to find a way to provide technology solutions capable of growing with their companies.
By focusing on building an infrastructure that can automatically scale, be automated, be monitored, secure, and built with compliance and flexibility in mind, companies will find they can grow at a faster rate while improving their overall performance and increasing the likelihood of long-term success.