Cutting TCO by 20% While Achieving High Availability Using AWS with PokerStars

Delivering a seamless player experience and exciting new games is crucial for online gaming company PokerStars to stay competitive in a saturated market. When PokerStars was founded, the gaming provider ran its workloads on premises, eventually growing to host its games in 33 data centers globally.

The overhead and risk associated with remaining on premises, however, were significant. PokerStars wanted to transform its backend systems to achieve high availability and flexibility, lower its carbon footprint, and offer exceptional player experiences. Using HAQM Web Services (AWS), PokerStars migrated to the cloud, thus reducing operating costs and accelerating development cycles.

After getting executive buy-in, aligning PokerStars’s technical teams was next. The company provided hands-on training and ran proofs of concept for migrating to the cloud. PokerStars also held AWS GameDays, which are gamified learning events that challenge participants to use AWS solutions to solve real-world technical problems in a team-based setting.

“Showing everyone what we could do really changed our momentum,” says Graeme Fowler, managing director of technology at PokerStars. “The boot camps and workshops we did had a huge uptake and were really well received.” Over 1,100 PokerStars technologists completed 2,660 unique training courses through the company’s internal cloud academy. The cloud academy was created with support from the AWS Skills Guild, which helped PokerStars develop a culture of learning to accelerate cloud adoption and digital transformation.

For its migration strategy, the company collaborated alongside AWS Professional Services to help it achieve its desired business outcomes on AWS. PokerStars divided the cloud migration into three phases, prioritizing its largest data center in the Isle of Man. To quickly get its workloads on AWS, the PokerStars teams did a lift and shift. “We did not want to introduce additional complexity,” says Shane Murray, director of infrastructure at PokerStars. “We knew that we could implement disaster recovery and high availability infrastructure after we migrated, which would minimize our business risk.”

For hosting its games, PokerStars uses HAQM Elastic Compute Cloud (HAQM EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. The company runs its workloads across multiple AWS Regions to minimize impacts on the gaming experience.

The team also adopted AWS Cloud WAN, which lets organizations build, manage, and monitor global wide area networks. “AWS Cloud WAN is the backbone for our global network and is really powerful for our games,” says McCormick. “Using it, we were able to build a resilient network with low latency.” Applying the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, the company strengthened its security stance by implementing firewalls, establishing security groups, and partitioning its networks. These added measures give players peace of mind that their data is protected.

PokerStars’s games now run fully on AWS. In the first migration phase, the company migrated 1,100 applications and 3 PB of data to the cloud, representing 70 percent of its on-premises footprint. Since operating in the cloud, PokerStars has started using fully managed services.

To free its developers from managing Kafka clusters, PokerStars implemented HAQM Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (HAQM MSK)—a fully managed, highly available Apache Kafka service for streaming data. “It takes the stress and overhead away,” says Fowler. “Our people can focus on developing products instead of running Kafka services, which has made them really happy.” PokerStars’s production change rate has sped up by 40 percent.

In line with its original goals, PokerStars has reduced its TCO by 20 percent and is on track to meet its net-zero carbon pledge by 2035. “Migrating to AWS has supported PokerStars in achieving resiliency targets while improving developer velocity and lowering TCO,” says McCormick. “We’re also well on the path to achieving our sustainability targets and look forward to expanding our work alongside AWS in the future.”

PokerStars will migrate the remainder of its on-premises workloads to AWS by the end of 2025. “We’re reusing the capabilities we’ve unlocked on AWS across our other brands,” says McCormick. “We’ve built up our expertise and a great deal of know-how from this experience.”

As the company unifies its data in AWS and adopts more managed services, PokerStars will tap into machine learning and artificial intelligence. “We have this modern, new data system that we can use to drive innovation in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space,” says Fowler. “Our teams are eager to migrate to AWS.”lution.