Cutting TCO by 20% While Achieving High Availability Using AWS with PokerStars

PokerStars, a brand of Flutter Entertainment (Flutter), is one of the largest poker sites in the world. Nearly 850,000 hands of poker are dealt every hour, reaching 3.4 million players in 140 countries. Over the years, PokerStars set up 33 data centers to support its online players. This setup was susceptible to downtime and tedious to maintain.

When Flutter acquired PokerStars in 2019, it wanted to reduce the operational complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO) for its technology stack. “Flutter’s ambitions for PokerStars are very high,” says Paul McCormick, chief technology officer at Flutter. “We wanted to accelerate PokerStars’s growth, but the reality was that the brand’s capabilities and technology foundation needed more investment.”

The company knew it wanted to migrate to the cloud, so it considered several options. PokerStars needed a cloud service provider that could deliver low latency and scale to millions of players. “Our vision is to have epic player experiences that are powered by flexible, scalable cloud technology,” says McCormick. Meeting the company’s sustainability goals and improving developer velocity were also key.

The Flutter team visited the AWS Executive Briefing Center, where businesses can have customized discussions with executives and experts to accelerate their cloud journeys. “Our conversations with the AWS team helped us see what the possibilities were and reinforced that AWS was the right choice for us,” says McCormick.

After getting executive buy-in, aligning PokerStars’s technical teams was next. The company provided hands-on training and ran proofs of concept for migrating to the cloud. PokerStars also held AWS GameDays, which are gamified learning events that challenge participants to use AWS solutions to solve real-world technical problems in a team-based setting.

“Showing everyone what we could do really changed our momentum,” says Graeme Fowler, managing director of technology at PokerStars. “The boot camps and workshops we did had a huge uptake and were really well received.” Over 1,100 PokerStars technologists completed 2,660 unique training courses through the company’s internal cloud academy. The cloud academy was created with support from the AWS Skills Guild, which helped PokerStars develop a culture of learning to accelerate cloud adoption and digital transformation.

For its migration strategy, the company collaborated alongside AWS Professional Services to help it achieve its desired business outcomes on AWS. PokerStars divided the cloud migration into three phases, prioritizing its largest data center in the Isle of Man. To quickly get its workloads on AWS, the PokerStars teams did a lift and shift. “We did not want to introduce additional complexity,” says Shane Murray, director of infrastructure at PokerStars. “We knew that we could implement disaster recovery and high availability infrastructure after we migrated, which would minimize our business risk.”

For hosting its games, PokerStars uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. The company runs its workloads across multiple AWS Regions to minimize impacts on the gaming experience.

The team also adopted AWS Cloud WAN, which lets organizations build, manage, and monitor global wide area networks. “AWS Cloud WAN is the backbone for our global network and is really powerful for our games,” says McCormick. “Using it, we were able to build a resilient network with low latency.” Applying the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, the company strengthened its security stance by implementing firewalls, establishing security groups, and partitioning its networks. These added measures give players peace of mind that their data is protected.

PokerStars’s games now run fully on AWS. In the first migration phase, the company migrated 1,100 applications and 3 PB of data to the cloud, representing 70 percent of its on-premises footprint. Since operating in the cloud, PokerStars has started using fully managed services.

To free its developers from managing Kafka clusters, PokerStars implemented Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)—a fully managed, highly available Apache Kafka service for streaming data. “It takes the stress and overhead away,” says Fowler. “Our people can focus on developing products instead of running Kafka services, which has made them really happy.” PokerStars’s production change rate has sped up by 40 percent.

In line with its original goals, PokerStars has reduced its TCO by 20 percent and is on track to meet its net-zero carbon pledge by 2035. “Migrating to AWS has supported PokerStars in achieving resiliency targets while improving developer velocity and lowering TCO,” says McCormick. “We’re also well on the path to achieving our sustainability targets and look forward to expanding our work alongside AWS in the future.”

PokerStars will migrate the remainder of its on-premises workloads to AWS by the end of 2025. “We’re reusing the capabilities we’ve unlocked on AWS across our other brands,” says McCormick. “We’ve built up our expertise and a great deal of know-how from this experience.”

As the company unifies its data in AWS and adopts more managed services, PokerStars will tap into machine learning and artificial intelligence. “We have this modern, new data system that we can use to drive innovation in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space,” says Fowler. “Our teams are eager to migrate to AWS.”lution.