Entain accelerates cloud transformation using Experience-Based Acceleration

Entain operates in a rapidly growing industry with over 30 regulated gaming markets, especially in the United States and Latin America. One of the company’s key competitive advantages is its proprietary sports and gaming platform. To achieve its growth targets, keep improving its offering, and meet demand, the gaming operator needed to modernize its on-premises architecture by adopting a scalable platform. “We wanted to build a dynamic platform for the future,” says Rashid Matin, group head of platform engineering at Entain.

The company selected AWS for its breadth of managed services and deep industry expertise. What’s more, AWS offers proven gaming technology solutions to deliver high-quality, low-latency, and interactive live content directly to players. “AWS has expertise in the industry and understands our challenges,” says Matin.

As part of the overall engagement, AWS suggested using the EBA program to help Entain’s teams quickly understand modernization and apply it to their applications. This hands-on, immersive engagement would equip the company’s engineers with the skills they need to build cloud-based solutions. “The EBA program was an accelerator in upskilling our engineers and increasing their knowledge of AWS services, leading to greater innovation, reliability, and resiliency,” says Matin.

During the first phase of the EBA program, Entain worked alongside AWS to identify a target area to modernize, starting with its Core Racing application. This was a strategic decision because the application’s event-driven technology stack would help the company create a blueprint for migrating other workloads. First, the AWS team helped the gaming operator conceptualize its new architecture. Then, during the EBA, the AWS and Entain teams tackled the technical challenges of application and database migrations.

An important component of the EBA program was creating a blueprint for expansion. During the EBA, Entain evaluated different solutions for a container-based architecture to reduce its reliance on proprietary operating systems. The company ultimately selected Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to start, run, and scale Kubernetes. “It was a natural fit for what we wanted to achieve from both an enterprise security and a flexibility standpoint,” says Matin. “We standardized on Amazon EKS as the foundation to build out our Internal Developer Platform. As a result, we reduced the cognitive load on engineers and helped them build and ship faster while maintaining security and resiliency.”

The gaming operator also adopted Amazon Aurora, which provides high performance and availability at a global scale for PostgreSQL. “Using open source database technology such as PostgreSQL is a key piece of our modernization journey,” says Matin. To migrate its databases to Aurora, Entain used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which is trusted by customers to securely migrate over 1.5 million databases with minimal downtime. This way, the company could sync data to the cloud before scaling down its on-premises databases, achieving near-zero downtime and verifying that the migration wouldn’t impact customers.

Through the EBA program, Entain gained not only the knowledge of how to develop solutions on the cloud but also the ability to scale this expertise across teams. The company reduced the time to deploy a proof of concept from weeks to under 2 hours, as demonstrated at Entain’s first global AI hackathon. Built on AWS, the company’s platform helped developers worldwide cut the time to deploy new code from weeks to 2 hours. To solve some of the challenges that developers face, Entain used Kiro, accelerating the time to modernize and debug the code base.

The Internal Developer Platform now powers the company’s soccer simulation models. After Entain optimized those models on AWS, their simulation time dropped from 2.5 seconds to 450 milliseconds. The acceleration and kick start with the EBA led to a platform and blueprint that support Entain across multiple verticals. This helped the gaming operator migrate quickly but safely. The company now has over 10 of its biggest frontend labels running on AWS, with more going live constantly.

Just as importantly, the cloud transformation has empowered Entain’s engineers to work with more autonomy, moving away from the traditional siloed approach. Teams can now deploy their own workloads, avoiding time-consuming handoffs and streamlining operations. “Our engineers are free to innovate and embrace risk,” says Matin. “Previously, engineers were restricted in the tools that they could access, and they needed to make adjustments in how things were developed. Now, a lot of those restrictions are gone, and our engineers have greater flexibility.”

Entain’s goal is to complete its cloud transformation within 2–3 years. “We’re collaborating closely with the AWS team so that as we modernize, everyone is aligned to the strategic technologies that we have in place,” says Matin. “Migrating from on premises to the cloud, we’ve been able to provide a modernization and transformation blueprint, optimize costs, and reduce our infrastructure footprint.”

The company plans to further increase efficiency by using AWS Lambda to run code without thinking about servers or clusters. Entain will also explore bringing AI into its Internal Developer Platform, providing a reusable framework to accelerate product development. These advancements can further support its modernization journey, giving teams new ways to build, experiment, and deliver value quickly. “By participating in the EBA program as part of our overall modernization journey using AWS, we’re fostering a culture of innovation,” says Matin.