Accelerating New Market Launches from 9 Months to 3 Weeks on AWS with Blexr

Blexr connects hundreds of thousands of customers daily to online gaming offers from casinos and other brands. But as the company grew, its complex, monolithic infrastructure slowed development and couldn’t respond well to fluctuations in traffic. “We were already on AWS, but our systems had been built over the years by lots of people without much architectural direction,” says Andrew Hill, head of technology at Blexr. After 7–8 years of growth, even small updates risked disrupting service.

Blexr uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), which runs highly secure, reliable, and scalable containers, to separate infrastructure components. The company also offloads container management using AWS Fargate, which provides serverless compute for containers. “The containerization capabilities of AWS offer lots of possibilities for using serverless technology so that we don’t have to manage things ourselves,” says Hill.

With a containerized infrastructure, Blexr can focus on delivering rich, useful experiences to audiences quickly and flexibly. “We’re launching new markets and building new experiences for users faster than ever,” says Hill. Where a new market launch used to take 9 months, Blexr can now do it in 3 weeks. The company launched in seven new territory and language markets in the second half of 2023 while reducing infrastructure management from eight people to two.

With the new architecture, pages load more quickly for users. Blexr increased its core web vitals performance score from Lighthouse from 80 to 95. “Lower latency has a real impact on conversion rates,” says Hill. “The new infrastructure on AWS offers users a far superior experience.” As a result, Blexr has improved conversion rates by 30 percent for its flagship brand. Meanwhile, the company has reduced compute costs for web app traffic by 50 percent, even as it expands and accelerates development.

By using Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, developers are shipping features that users want instead of worrying about the effects of every change. Blexr is also using AWS for scalable compute. “We don’t have to worry about the underlying compute power for our containerized workloads,” says Hill.

Blexr was the SiGMA Casino Affiliate and EGR Awards’ Casino Affiliate winner of 2019. It was also a runner-up Affiliate Employer of the Year and awarded “Highly Commended” in the IGB Affiliate Awards in 2024. Next, Blexr wants to improve how it uses its data to unlock new brand opportunities and empower existing brands to build new features, such as user-generated content and industry-standard casino ratings.

“We’re building real momentum toward our aspirations,” says Hill. “We are able to take advantage of the benefits of new technology quickly because we’ve built all this agility in.”