Migrating 1 PB of database data to AWS with PokerStars

PokerStars is one of the world’s largest online poker platforms. It also serves as the internal business-to-business poker-platform provider for Flutter Entertainment brands globally.

To maintain its competitive edge, PokerStars needed to modernize its database infrastructure. The on-premises IBM Db2 data center environment was performing well. But migrating the legacy databases to the cloud would help increase resiliency, scalability, and operational agility while providing a more flexible foundation for future growth and innovation.

Deciding which cloud solution would best suit the platform was a complex decision. iGaming is a highly regulated, always-on industry where millisecond latency directly affects player experience. Every bet, card deal, or roulette spin initiates real-time database transactions requiring extremely low latency. “Customers don’t really care what technology the system is running on. What they care about is the availability of the system,” says Dmitry Gomel, head of cloud engineering at Flutter Entertainment.

To migrate nearly 1 PB of data supporting transactional, analytical, and archival databases, PokerStars needed an enterprise storage architecture that was capable of supporting high traffic and heavy workloads without disrupting service. After an initial evaluation of solutions, the PokerStars team narrowed its focus to AWS services.

To determine which AWS technology was the right fit, the PokerStars team conducted an extensive 6-month review process, including proof-of-concept testing and analysis alongside AWS architects. The team considered two AWS storage solutions: Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), which provides high-performance block storage at virtually any scale, and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (Amazon FSx ONTAP), which provides fully managed shared storage built on NetApp’s popular ONTAP file system. The teams simulated online transaction-processing and online analytical-processing workloads with up to 150 TB of generated test data. Key factors in PokerStars’s decision-making process included performance, efficiency, scale, flexibility, and cost.

With the breadth of AWS storage options available, PokerStars could choose workload-specific solutions instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all approach. It selected Amazon FSx ONTAP and Amazon EBS io2 Block Express—which delivers consistent sub-millisecond latency—as complementary storage solutions, each optimized for different workloads. Amazon FSx ONTAP provided built-in deduplication and compression for the bulk of PokerStars’s database data, while Amazon EBS io2 Block Express delivered the ultralow latency required for the brand’s high-throughput transactional database logs. Together, these services provided the performance, cost-efficiency, and flexibility needed to support the migration. “AWS was absolutely supportive in the way we wanted to do this. They participated in the whole process—and they didn’t push us into choosing AWS tech. It was the pure numbers that led us to our decision,” says Gomel.

The PokerStars team completed the cloud transformation of PokerStars’s database infrastructure, migrating nearly 1 PB of Db2 data to AWS in approximately 17 months. Using Amazon FSx ONTAP as its primary storage solution for database data, PokerStars achieved equivalent performance to on-premises IBM Db2 systems. PokerStars maintained live operations through the majority of the migration, completing the final stages during planned cutover windows.

“Neither transaction volumes nor processing times changed with the migration to AWS from on-premises infrastructure. That was huge, considering that in the background, storage was constantly being compressed, deduplicated, and then uncompressed,” says Fedor Soldatov, principal database administrator at Flutter Entertainment.

By migrating to AWS, PokerStars gained flexibility, scalability, and automation possibilities. “Migrating into the cloud gave us the option to iterate much faster, to extend or shrink the business on request without losing money,” says Gomel. Using Amazon FSx ONTAP, PokerStars also achieved up to 40 percent deduplication and compression of its data on some of its file systems, leading to an overall reduction in storage costs. Tuning, thin provisioning, and rightsizing led to a 30 percent post-migration cost reduction.

PokerStars plans to continue exploring AWS solutions such as automated storage tiering options on Amazon FSx ONTAP, blue-green deployment in multiple Availability Zones, and AI and advanced analytics to enhance resiliency for its databases.

“It’s certainly a lot easier now that we’re on AWS. We’re less reliant on multiple teams, we’re more streamlined, and we’re a lot more efficient,” says Soldatov.