Migrating a 30+ TB production database using AWS with PlayNirvana

PlayNirvana provides an around-the-clock iGaming solution to licensed operators across regulated markets in Europe, Africa, and Asia. As the company’s operations grew, its existing cloud environment no longer provided the control, responsiveness, performance, or cost predictability that the company needed. In a regulated industry, unresolved database issues and slow support could affect availability, client service, and licensing requirements.

“It's an always-on, real-money, heavily regulated industry where availability and data integrity are the business,” says Josip Tusun, chief information officer at PlayNirvana. Availability is tied directly to operator licensing requirements, and any downtime carries both financial and regulatory consequences.

PlayNirvana needed a cloud provider that could offer reliable connectivity with sub-second performance at scale, multijurisdiction regulatory compliance, and predictable costs. After evaluating its options, the company chose AWS for its managed database capabilities, structured migration approach, specialist support throughout the migration process, and transparent pricing.

To successfully migrate PlayNirvana’s 30-plus TB production database to AWS, the company used the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP) to accelerate its cloud migration and modernization journey with an outcome-driven methodology. AWS MAP organized the project into three phases—Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate and Modernize—giving the company a structured approach when evaluating its existing environment, preparing its infrastructure, and completing the migration.

“Our AWS team guided us through the AWS MAP, which made a multistep program feel structured from day 1,” says Tusun. AWS solutions architects and database specialists also supported PlayNirvana with database tuning, instance selection, and network requirements throughout the project.

Key to the migration’s success was Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, a relational database that provides customization and greater control over PlayNirvana’s production database settings, while automatic failover and synchronous commit supported its availability and data-protection requirements. For enhanced performance, PlayNirvana uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity. The company runs Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL on AWS Graviton-based instances, which deliver improved price performance for its transaction-heavy workload. AWS Site-to-Site VPN extends on-premises networks to the cloud, providing secure hybrid connectivity with operators’ systems.

PlayNirvana also uses read replicas to separate analytical workloads from its production database, letting its teams develop reports without affecting the live gaming environment. PlayNirvana implemented its own controls and processes while also looking to AWS’s shared responsibility model and EU data residency capabilities to support the company’s compliance requirements across multiple regulated markets.

PlayNirvana migrated its 30-plus TB production database to AWS in approximately 3 months with near-zero downtime. The company now processes more than 10 million financial transactions per hour while supporting 600 live sports events at peak times and more than 200 game studios concurrently.

The company also reports fewer global outages, a near-zero recovery point objective, and a rapid recovery time objective of 60–120 seconds. More than 35,000 metrics are monitored in near real time, with around-the-clock alerts, giving teams greater visibility into infrastructure and application health.

By migrating to AWS, PlayNirvana gained the scalability, availability, compliance foundation, and operational control that it needed to operate in highly regulated markets while improving client satisfaction. “We made the right choice, we had the right people supporting us, and we are really looking forward to the future that we will build using AWS,” says Tusun.