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NetEnt: Betting on DevOps | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices #CloudNative #Serverless

How an online gaming company leveraged DevOps for a 4,000% increase in deployment efficiency

According to a recent report from Statista, in the last 7 years online gaming has grown from a $22B industry to over $50B annually, fueled primarily by net-based casino games like roulette, slots and poker.

Behind the scenes of over 200 of the world's most prominent online gaming sites is a company called NetEnt. NetEnt (NASDAQ OMX Net-B) is a pioneer in online gaming, entertaining the world for the past 20 years. The company's innovative platform provides premium online and mobile gaming solutions to some of the world's largest online casino operators in over 40 countries, handling more 110 million gaming transactions on a daily basis - roughly 16X more throughput than that of the New York Stock Exchange!

Gaming is Big Business

Online and mobile gaming is booming. With millions of daily active users across the globe, on multiple devices (using mobile, laptops, tablets), and thousands of addictive gaming apps - gaming is big business.

Customers are invested in these applications- in making it to the next level, solving the puzzle, beating their friends, and - in the case of Casino games - also winning some $$!

Gaming apps have to continue to get better and better, load faster, be more entertaining, more secure, and - of course - be available 24/7/365 for players around the world, and for the businesses who rely on them.

Growing Pains

As NetEnt saw incredible growth, their IT operations experienced a few challenges.

With hundreds of online gaming portals reliant on NetEnt's technology, the backend of their systems became more complex and the Production footprint grew considerably. The NetEnt application is a typical Java app - with a clustered application server, database for transactions and reporting, and so on. Each customer running their own Casino brand also had their own test environment and supporting services. As the systems had to scale to service the growing number of customers white-labeling NetEnt's technology, the  development and IT operations that were supporting these customers became slower and more fragile.

The Dev organization was creating strains on the Ops teams, who were having difficulties keeping up with the pace of updates produced. As the number of games and operators in NetEnt's portfolio grew, they had to rethink their delivery pipeline to allow them to accelerate their releases as well as scale their operations to support the increased load and complexity.

Deployment Pains

In their delivery pipeline, deployments, in particular, became the Achilles Heel of the operation. A full-time employee was required to handle each and every deployment for every code change on every node in the growing Production footprint. This wasn't just for major releases - but also for bug fixes, security patches and minor updates. The manual process took about 4 hours per deploy, and  involved a 40-step checklist, often requiring downtime of the application. There was tons of risk with each deployment and downtime meant unsatisfied customers and lost revenue.

These slow, brittle, manual, error-prone deployments meant new features that were developed were taking longer and longer to actually be released into the market, and that on-boarding of new customers and applications were greatly delayed as well. The process of seeing Dev work actually getting delivered into the hands of end-users became risky and unpredictable. For example, looking at the JIRA tickets the Ops team was spending their time on - only 12% was being spent on "revenue generating" activities- such as releasing new games or onboarding new customers. Majority of the time - 88% -  was spent on deploying bug fixes and patches.

More Stories By Anders Wallgren

Anders Wallgren is Chief Technology Officer of Electric Cloud. Anders brings with him over 25 years of in-depth experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, Anders held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse. Anders also held management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award winning technologies such as Macromedia’s Director 7 and various Shockwave products.

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