AWS Codedeploy using Blue/Green Deployment:Online Gaming App

Client Profile

Stick Pool Club is an Online Multiplayer Real Money Gaming App that allows you to play Live Poker, 3D Poker, 8 Ball Pool, 9 Ball Pool & CallBreak Game with online gamers across the country. The gaming studio focuses on creating engaging games and providing its users with live gaming experiences across mobile, social and online platforms.

Key Requirement

Stick Pool Club was adamant about adding agile components to their existing infrastructure. It further shared aggressive growth plans that enhanced end-users gaming experience and brought in value-added services. It also determined whether the application should scale in or out based on the load. And that's how the gaming studio started evaluating multiple Public Cloud Service Providers and capable Born-in-Cloud partners to move their critical game servers.

Major Challenges

Stick Pool Club (SPC) developed an online multi-player gaming app, and with it came many challenges they had to tackle. Challenges as mentioned below: One of the most critical challenges SPC faced while planning to make a move was Data transfer costs associated with a Public Cloud Service Provider, which was a roadblock. SPC also shared its vision of launching Fantasy games along with existing games. Therefore, initial successful migration to Cloud became crucial. There was a need to release a new version into the production environment without impacting the end-users. Quick rollbacks to avoid massive maintenance windows. Deciding if the application must scale in or scale out based on the load. Monitoring the infrastructure to prevent any user impact.

Our Approach

Flentas helped design and migrate the application on AWS. We helped StickPoolClub with the below solutions: We first set up the gaming application on AWS using the below services:

AWS EC2 – To run the web services consumed by the Mobile Application.

Load-Balancer – To load balance on multiple EC2 Instances and manage scale.

AWS Autoscaling – To scale in and scale out EC2 instances based on load.

Amazon VPC – To segregate network between numerous environments.

Decoupled the application to leverage scaling using fully-managed AWS services like Amazon S3, Redis, etc. Set up DevOps pipelines to release new versions into the production environment with the below services:

Blue/Green deployment strategy used for deploying new releases.

BitBucket – GIT repositories for source code version control.

CodeDeploy – Deployment of new versions into autoscaling servers.

Amazon S3 – To store artifacts.

CodePipeline – To create DevOps pipelines.

Apart from setting up and architecting the application on AWS, Flentas also engaged with StickPoolClub with Cloud Managed Services:

Automated alerts creation for blue-green deployment.

Proactive 24/7 monitoring and Alerting of the Infrastructure and Application.

Enhancing the security and optimizing the cost through Managed Services Best Practices.

Measuring Success

Better Speed to Market Successful migration to AWS Cloud helped StickPool Club achieve better speed to market and be more aggressive in aligning their technology needs to achieve business objectives.

Better End-User Experience SPC trusted us to manage their entire infra on AWS Cloud. Through our Cloud Managed Services, we played the role of a trusted advisor from a long-term perspective, and they could focus on building great games with a better end-user experience.

40% Cost Savings Strategic planning and work for their CDN requirement done through AWS CloudFront, we helped SPC achieve more than 40% cost savings year-on-year.

Faster Releases and Quick Rollbacks Leveraging the blue-green deployment strategy enabled faster releases

Maximise Cost-Saving Avenues Flentas provided Stick Pool Club with infrastructure optimization and helped maximize cost-saving avenues by sharing fortnightly cost-saving reports and proactively working on the shared avenues.

24/7 Monitoring and Support Through our MS practice holistically, we took care of all the patch management, Business Continuity, Cloud Governance, Security posture, Incident Management, and performance requirements with ongoing support for ongoing business evolution.