Achieving 99.99% Uptime, 50% Lower Costs, and 22% Less Latency by Migrating to AWS with Onlyplay

Founded in 2020, Onlyplay combines game design and innovative technology to offer a fast, feature-rich online gaming experience for casino players. The company regularly introduces new features and social aspects to improve the player experience and add creative mechanics and tools.

Previously, Onlyplay used other cloud providers to handle traffic. However, the company needed to address several challenges to boost both game performance and developer productivity. For example, Onlyplay was losing 5–10 percent of packets of data because of networking issues. Each minor issue took considerable time and resources from the development team, slowing innovation and increasing costs.

In addition, the company wanted to migrate to a solution with reliable and responsive customer support. “We had a lot of small issues,” says Oleksandr, development operations lead at Onlyplay. “We tried to contact support, and we had conversations with our providers’ teams, but nobody could help us resolve our issues.”

The company also aimed to reduce latency so that it could increase the number of transactions per second and, thus, increase the total number of concurrent casino players. So, Onlyplay decided to unite its infrastructure on AWS. “It’s better to have one consolidated service, one provider for everything from content delivery to compute,” says Vladimir Muraviov, chief technology officer at Onlyplay.

Onlyplay migrated its entire infrastructure to AWS in 2 months with near-zero downtime. Since the migration in November 2024, the company has been running all its games and workloads on AWS.

When a player visits an online casino app or website to play one of the company’s games, their request first goes to the casino’s server, which then communicates with Onlyplay’s servers. The company offers all the assets for the game from Amazon CloudFront, which businesses can use to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. Thus, Onlyplay has reduced the time to load its assets by 21 percent.

Onlyplay handles real-time betting and other player interactions using Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at virtually any scale. These interactions need to be processed quickly, so there’s no room for latency or other networking issues. After migrating and consolidating its workloads on AWS, Onlyplay decreased latency by 22 percent while lowering costs by 50 percent. “The speed of player interactions in games has increased because, for every API call, the services we’re using are all together on AWS,” says Oleksandr. “Most of our casino partners use AWS, so there’s less latency between our API and their APIs.”

The company can also better adapt its infrastructure to meet player demand. “There’s more room for customization and adjustment on Amazon CloudFront,” says Oleksandr. “There are a lot of configurations and caching features that we can use.” Onlyplay handles domain-name-system traffic between players and game servers using Amazon Route 53, a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to internet applications. Meanwhile, all the games’ compute workloads use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a fully managed Kubernetes service.

The company has achieved 99.99 percent uptime on AWS, making its infrastructure more resilient. Onlyplay can focus on improving services and creating new games because it doesn’t have to worry about infrastructure. “We no longer have network issues,” says Oleksandr. “And we don’t need calls or consultations to resolve issues. We only run and don’t see loss of packets.” As a result, the company has sped up development and delivery of new features. By reducing latency and enhancing scalability, Onlyplay has increased the average number of bets by 20 percent, and it can now process as many as 2,500 transactions per second.

In addition, taking advantage of AWS Support, Onlyplay has satisfied a major goal of its migration. “The AWS team provides excellent support,” says Oleksandr. “We’ve resolved issues very easily. Because we can speak with the team in the same language, it’s easy to understand each other.”

With the migration complete, Onlyplay is adjusting its architecture and planning to use more AWS services to further increase its capacity for processing bets while reducing costs. The company also plans to provide near real-time analytics to marketing managers using AWS services, which is expected to increase its overall revenue.

“Using AWS, our servers work quickly, our services communicate with one data center, and we’ve reduced our latency and can provide assets rapidly,” says Oleksandr.