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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Building Geolocation Systems for the Betting & Gaming Industry on AWS

Overview

This Guidance helps betting and gaming service providers build geolocation verification systems suitable for use by licensed betting and gaming operators. Geolocation verification systems are often legally required to ensure that players are located within proper gaming jurisdictions when they place bets. This Guidance is designed to help enterprises build their own geolocation service that comes with low cost per check, flexible integration options, and high availability. In addition, service providers can access high-quality geospatial data from trusted data providers to better serve their customers.

This Guidance should not be construed as legal advice; enterprises that use this Guidance to build a geolocation service should consult their own counsel to determine whether the service built complies with applicable law.

The Integrity SDK provides enhanced features related to device verification, and it is available for use by request. To get access to the SDK and the onboarding guide, contact Sales Support.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

This Guidance facilitates the telemetry and traceability of player locations so that your betting & gaming operator customers can troubleshoot problems and regulators can confirm the proper operation of your system. Wager eligibility and location data are forwarded via EventBridge using Lambda to a DynamoDB table, to provide auditable information to your customers and regulators. CloudWatch stores the collected logs, metrics, and events from your applications and workload components so that authorized users can understand the system’s internal state and health and audit geolocation events.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

All data are encrypted in transit in this Guidance, and data stored within Amazon Location are encrypted at rest by default. In addition, all user data stored in DynamoDB are fully encrypted at rest. DynamoDB encryption at rest provides enhanced security by encrypting all your data at rest using encryption keys stored in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). In addition, the DynamoDB service should be restricted to be accessed only from the customer’s VPC using a VPC endpoint.

Read the Security whitepaper 

This Guidance anticipates demand spikes associated with seasonal sports wagering events in the betting and gaming industry. Instances scale automatically when you’re using Lambda, which quickly locates free capacity within its compute fleet every time an event notification is received for your function and runs your code up to the allocated concurrency. DynamoDB is designed for 99.99% availability for regional tables.

You can also monitor historical data about any events or issues that might affect your AWS environment. For example, AWS CloudTrail provides a record of various user or service actions. You can use CloudWatch to collect and analyze metrics related to your Amazon Location account and set CloudWatch to notify you if a metric meets certain conditions. You can also use AWS Health Dashboard to verify the status of Amazon Location.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

This Guidance uses serverless automatic scaling components to meet the spikes in demand associated with betting and gaming traffic. Serverless components, such as EventBridge and Lambda, scale up or down automatically to meet demand requirements, providing a more consistent user experience and low average latency.

Additionally, the AWS global infrastructure is built around AWS Regions, each providing multiple physically separated and isolated Availability Zones, which are connected with low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. You should select the Region closest to your betting and gaming customers for Amazon Location.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

This Guidance relies solely on serverless components, with the exception of your application. As a result, you can minimize your IT maintenance costs because you won’t need to spin up instances and install applications on them. You will only be charged for the resources you use.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

This Guidance uses components that automatically scale, reducing the environmental impact of the infrastructure by avoiding provisioning unused capacity. EventBridge, Lambda, and Amazon SQS automatically scale to handle your workload, consuming only the minimum required resources.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.