Casino in the cloudsGojko Adzic

Advanced Games Labgadzic@advancedgameslab.com

@gojkoadzic

www.AdvancedGamesLab.comwww.AbsoluteCasino.com

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The world's first social casino gaming network

Why clouds?

Eliminate waste Very high target volume Scale up and down and save on infrastructure Provide better service faster and cheaper

Are we spending our time doing stuff that really matters?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sathwick/451847158

Eliminate waste

http://www.flickr.com/photos/antoniele/2930240461

Very high target volume

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreadfuldan/746297725

Flexibility to scale up or down

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bocavermelha/12105189

Cloud economics: we develop and deploy faster and cheaper – so we

have a competitive edge

Challenges and surprises

Monitoring Load balancing Shared storage Pre-packaged systems Security

Monitoring – no more flashing lights!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mumpfpuffel/2342924629

Load balancing – not your usual Cisco story

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtbl/19039168

Network storage: only one at a time

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dexell1827/2798949753/

Pre-packaged systems: always read the label

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gx9/2276704055

Security: How much can we trust them to do a good job?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/p_h/2461925124

To make the most out of clouds, the system needs to be designed for

that! Scale to lots of small boxes Scale up and down Expect boxes to go away and come online

No more simple fail-over

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamingkaettchen/103890429

Solution: use grids

We saved a ton of money and time by not building it ourselves

Data redundancy Scaling to lots of small machines Partitioning and task routing Asynchronous persistence

Why we chose GigaSpaces?

Pay-per-use on the cloud Fully transactional Cloud support

Automated deployment tools SLA for the grid

We still ended up rolling some features on our own

Asynchronous persistence Simpler, faster

Deployment scripts Reuse cloud machines, don't reconfigure the rest Cut redeployment time from 2 hrs to 10 mins

Surprises

SLA cannot dynamically grow Start with more partitions than you need then

relocate Only partial hot-deployment

Apparently improved in v7 Classloading

Wasted lots of time solving this Also improved in v7

On a more positive note – fantastic support

Why not use this for production as well to scale it on demand?

Security Regulatory requirements

Learn how to be friends ...

It doesn't have to be “yes” or “no”

It gives us a serious competitive edge System broken down so that we can use it for

the largest part No unencrypted sensitive information there Transaction processing not there But the bulk of bandwidth is

Messages Content Web front-end

What we learned

Levels the playing field for startups To make the most out of it, the whole system

needs to be designed for clouds up front Get a Grid Solves lots of problems but creates some new

ones

What I'd like to see in the future

Open Source grids SLAs for the cloud Solutions for regulatory/security issues