The GR8 Tech’s expertise in providing service for launching or upgrading the iGaming business is based on more than 20 years of experience in operations as a B2C provider. The company supported the businesses as it grew and expanded internationally, often by franchising into new markets.

Those franchises use the tools and technology developed by GR8 Tech. However, by 2018, the infrastructure was hampering the company’s ambitions. “Our platform was stuck at the architecture’s limits,” says Artur Ashyrov, chief technology officer (CTO) at GR8 Tech. “It was impossible to scale up or to grow operations due to limits in both the platform and our infrastructure. We saw huge spikes in betting on games during soccer tournaments, such as the World Cup, and weren’t capable of handling them without performance degradation. This was the main reason we decided to create a new platform and looked at AWS as our infrastructure provider. We wanted to build a new system, using a microservices architecture, that could run in the cloud.”

iGaming operators face several challenges in the real-money gaming business, which is a high-load industry that needs to handle millions of transactions in a short period. Players want their transactions to be processed with minimal delay—especially for winnings or deposits credited to their accounts. “Trust is essential for operators, and that means responsive transactions,” says Ashyrov. “We saw delays of an extra 2-3 seconds in placing bets and receiving winnings during top events. Slowing the flow of money is bad for the business. If the customer experience isn’t good, people will go elsewhere. Delivering a responsive experience keeps our clients’ players from moving to a competitor.”  

To overcome scalability limitations and improve responsiveness, GR8 Tech migrated key elements of its platform to the cloud. It chose AWS for its ability to support elasticity and DevOps requirements. “Our aim was to build the ultimate service for our customers, and we needed a provider we could trust to achieve this goal,” says Ashyrov.

GR8 Tech participated in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration methodology. “MAP is a great way to control costs when migrating from a data center to the cloud,” says Ashyrov. “It helps determine the correct size of your infrastructure and eases the burden of the budget. Moreover, the introduction to cloud technologies and assistance with managed service can be very helpful.”

GR8 Tech has adopted Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run Kubernetes in the AWS Cloud and on-premises data centers. “It really helps save time on the operations part,” says Ashyrov. “Because we use it as a standard to run all our services and workloads, it’s great to have this level of convenience. We know it will be updated and have all the current patches which is important for platform security.”

The company also needed robust storage. Today, it uses both Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—cloud object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere—and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 provides secure, resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. This means that the GR8 Tech platform can handle variable demand and support growth while delivering a fast, reliable service to customers.

The platform is now more flexible and always prepared for peak loads, thanks to AWS Auto Scaling, which provides application scaling to optimize performance and costs. Using artificial intelligence predictions developed in-house by GR8 Tech, the rapid scaling allows the platform to handle millions of bet settlements during major sports events without any downtime.

Information security and data protection, especially around customer trust and regulatory issues, was another challenge for the business. GR8 Tech needed to meet or exceed all regulations in each of its jurisdictions, and it has benefited from the improved security controls built into AWS services.

GR8 Tech has always prioritized strong security for its platforms and the services provided to customers. With help of AWS’s secure infrastructure, GR8 Tech could migrate to the cloud without worrying that it would compromise its ability to obtain and maintain the certifications it needed. “AWS solutions were a positive factor in us obtaining industry certifications such as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), GLI-19 (Gaming Laboratories International 19), and GLI-33 (Gaming Laboratories International 33),” says Ashyrov. “We were able to get these certifications for card processing—and for compliance with industry standards for gambling and event wagering—more easily because of the AWS-compliant services and easy setup of controls required by these regulations. These certifications are essential to our clients being able to operate in many jurisdictions.”
The company also used AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) as a part of AWS Enterprise Support, which offers architecture and scaling guidance, and operational support during the preparation and execution of planned events. Because many of the peaks in demand for GR8 Tech are the result of scheduled sporting events, it seemed a good fit. “Together with our technical account manager, we completed IEM and supported our customers during the 2022 FIFA World Cup with zero downtime,” says Ashyrov.

GR8 Tech also used Cloud Financial Management with AWS, which transforms businesses with cost transparency, control, forecasting, and optimization, to better manage resources and costs.

Using AWS, GR8 Tech can adapt to unexpected circumstances, such as heavy drops in traffic or sudden increased business volume. “Using AWS, we can balance our expenditures according to our load and manage this effectively in crises,” says Ashyrov. “As an example, Parimatch, which is based in Ukraine, faced challenges during the first month of the Russian attack when player activity dropped dramatically. Back then, we decreased costs for managing the platform for Parimatch by 25 percent. But after the business performance was restored, we could quickly scale up to support normal traffic.”

GR8 Tech’s new flexibility and responsiveness have set it up for future growth. It can now handle more than 200,000 simultaneous users and 54,000 transactions per second with no more than 25 milliseconds of latency 95 percent of the time. “Our clients’ business operations are very spiky,” says Ashyrov. “Using AWS, we can handle that now, whether it’s the World Cup, the Super Bowl, or any other event on the planet.”