Application Containerisation for Betting Giant

Case Study – Tabcorp - Wagerplayer Containerisation

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Tabcorp is Australia's largest gambling company, employing more than 5,000 people. It is the largest provider of wagering and gaming products and services in Australia, and they operate a diverse stack of technology to efficiently support their business. Due to the nature of the business, projects at Tabcorp are always connected with unique challenges

Business Challenge

Wagerplayer is a proprietary off-the-shelf system for managing bets, which is well-integrated and offers highly customisable algorithms. From the technical standpoint it’s a monolithic application written in PHP. The Wagerplayer ecosystem at Tabcorp also included numerous in-house built services, written in Java, for providing integrations into various other systems.

The solution originally was run in the data centre and as part of the Cloud Adoption initiative had to be moved into AWS. Phase 1 of the project didn’t include any re-engineering and the solution was moved into a like-to-like infrastructure setup in AWS with static always-on EC2 instances, manual deployment processes, little to zero observability.

After a bill-shock and numerous issues with the reliability of the solution, the business decided to proceed with the Phase 2 of the migration, which included a complete re-architecture of the Wageplayer ecosystem to optimise costs, increase development velocity and enhance the platform reliability.

Solution

Innablr was engaged by Tabcorp for the Phase 2 of the Wagerplayer migration, which included a re-architecture of the Wagerplayer product and all the satellite services:

1. Containerisation of Wagerplayer

   1. New workflow for the developers

   2. New artifact management solution

   3. New deployment strategies

2. Designing new infrastructure in AWS

   1. Full infrastructure-as-code

   2. Automated deployment pipelines

   3. ECS with automatic scaling

   4. DNS and Service Discovery

   5. Observability solution based on AWS Cloudwatch and ELK

3. Running the production migration of the working Wagerplayer onto the new platform

4. After-migration enhanced support and troubleshooting
   

Benefits

Innablr has successfully finished the project in tight cooperation with the Tabcorp delivery teams. After the migration and the enhanced support period the business was presented with the cost statistics for the new platform, which indicated a seven-fold cost reduction in comparison to the Phase 1 Wagerplayer platform.

The observability solution allowed the operations teams to provide better quality support for the platform and overall increased reliability of the platform from around 2 P1 incident a week to around 1 P1 incident every two months.

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Tab Corp Containerisation

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