DreamCasino Scales Up While Reducing Costs by 30% Using AWS

Headquartered in Norway, DreamCasino provides digital customer solutions for casinos and sports betting platforms. The company was founded in December 2020 and initially offered a single service, hosted using on-premises hardware. As it expanded its offerings, it realized that it could better scale using the cloud, so DreamCasino migrated to AWS in 2022. Following the migration, the company felt its self-managed architecture was still limited. Therefore, DreamCasino sought additional expertise to understand which cloud services to use and how to optimize and modernize its environment. “DreamCasino wanted its focus to be on the product, not on the infrastructure side,” says Vikram Aditya, development and operations lead at DreamCasino.

DreamCasino was introduced to the Axiom team at an industry event. In December 2022, after a successful proof of concept, DreamCasino and Axiom began working together. The engagement began with a review based on AWS Well-Architected, a framework to learn, measure, and build using architectural best practices. This review identified areas where DreamCasino could strengthen its scalability, availability, and security configurations. The AWS Well-Architected review highlighted recommendations for DreamCasino to address, and the teams then set to work refactoring DreamCasino’s infrastructure on AWS.

DreamCasino’s digital transformation journey took 1 year and was completed with zero downtime for its customers. “Axiom has shaped our services,” says Sarabjeet Singh, CEO of DreamCasino. “The team at Axiom understands our workloads, and it has helped us build our architecture, choose the right AWS services, and set up autoscaling.” (See Figure 1. DreamCasino’s Architecture on AWS.) As a result of the engagement, DreamCasino solutions perform 50 percent better, with API response times going from 600–800 milliseconds to 200–300 milliseconds.

The first issue that DreamCasino addressed in the refactoring was scalability. It migrated its self-managed container infrastructure to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service. “Previously, we had customers that were requesting our services, but we couldn’t scale to meet the demand,” says Aditya. “Now, that scaling challenge is completely gone, and we are expanding our services to new market regions.”

To run its containers, DreamCasino uses AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine. Using AWS Fargate boosts DreamCasino’s ability to scale by automatically deploying new containers when demand arises without the company needing to provision or manage underlying infrastructure. “When we shifted to using AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS, we no longer had the issues of scalability, and we improved performance and cost-effectiveness,” says Anil Kumar Lakineni, DevOps and cloud architect at Axiom.

One of Axiom’s specialties is helping its customers cost-optimize on AWS. “We want DreamCasino to achieve its scalability and tech capabilities while keeping costs in check,” says Shiva Kunadharaju, head of operations and customer engagement at Axiom. Axiom helped DreamCasino choose services that would provide cost savings as well as performance. For example, by using AWS Fargate, DreamCasino eliminated blue/green deployments, which reduced its overall footprint and cut compute costs by 25 percent.

Additionally, Axiom helped DreamCasino optimize brokers and partitions in Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)—a service to ingest and process streaming data in near real time—which DreamCasino uses to support messaging in its microservices-based application. These optimizations cut its Amazon MSK costs by 40 percent.

As an AWS Partner, Axiom also helped DreamCasino save an additional 10–15 percent using Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that can save up to 72 percent compared with Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing. In all, DreamCasino reduced total costs by 30 percent.

Axiom also provides DreamCasino with 24/7 managed security operations. It implemented several AWS services to strengthen and simplify the management of DreamCasino’s security, including Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service, and AWS Security Hub, a cloud security posture management service. DreamCasino also gained greater observability of AWS resources through Amazon CloudWatch, so that it can now monitor and analyze its performance, a capability it didn’t have previously.

Alongside cost reductions, the changes to the architecture reduced DreamCasino’s emissions. The footprint for the service at peak season has been reduced from 1.43 metric tons of carbon dioxide to 0.457 metric tons, a 68 percent decrease.

“Axiom helped us optimize our costs, scale our applications, and improve performance, delivering significant results in a short time frame,” says Singh.

Having overcome scaling restrictions and established cost optimization, DreamCasino is expanding to new markets in Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Its infrastructure is all managed either by Axiom using AWS services, so it can focus on building out new solutions to cater to specific regional interests, such as soccer betting in Brazil.

“Our tech team got a lot of freedom on the AWS infrastructure side because of the cost savings that we achieved with the help of Axiom,” says Singh. “We have the flexibility to try something new, and we can quickly deploy new services in nonproduction environments to test them out.”