How DevOps is Accelerating the Gaming Industry

www.ranger4.com DevOpstasticRanger4 and IBM

How DevOps is Accelerating

the Gaming Industry

Wednesday 3rd

December 2014


Agenda

• Being first to the market with new Apps is crucial

• Speed, Agility and the ability to innovate are essential

• Have less reliance on 3rd parties

• Ensuring you're getting more from your existing IT estate

• Deliver more functionality more frequently

• Meet demanding and changing customer requirements

• Automate processes and delivery cycles


Trends

• Revenue

– Revenue from games and game content is up and on par with

the movie industry $24b in 2013

• China saw a 34% increase in games revenue in 2012, and online

gaming made up 94% of the total.

• Diversity

– women now account for 47% of U.S. gamers, up from 42% in

2012

• Multichannel

– As on-line gaming becomes an increasingly significant part of

the whole market, the target platform becomes more diverse


UK Trends

• The British gambling industry, as regulated by the

Commission, generated a gross gambling yield (GGY) of

£6.3 billion between April 2012 and March 2013, a rise of

over £0.4 billion (7%) compared to the period April 2011

to March 2012.

• The non-remote betting sector represents the largest

market with a 51% share of GGY.

• Growth can be seen in betting, bingo, casino, remote

(betting, bingo and casino) and lotteries sectors. Only

the arcades sector experienced a decrease in GGY

between the two most recent reporting periods.


Multichannel - Scale

• Scale

– Events drive audience figures

– Grand National, European Cup Final – all

drive significantly larger audiences

– Scaling can no longer be efficient on the basis

of budgeting for busiest day

- Infrastructure is left idle most of the time


Multichannel – Know Your Customer

• Internet Gaming offers the opportunity to

get to know the customer better

– The Battlefield is around customer Loyalty

– Analytics and Enterprise Marketing tools

encourage better knowledge leading to more

appropriate offers with a higher chance of

engagement

• Understand customer preferences

• Better understand the ROI on any targeted offer


Multichannel – Time To Production

• The pace of innovation in the gaming industry is

driven by the demand for new features, more

usable and engaging user interfaces

• Delivery of new function is now part of the

competitive landscape

• The effect on the Development cycle is

significant

– Faster Deployment cycles

• Code drops more frequent

– Less time for testing


The emergence of ‘DevOps’

Operations

Cre

ativ

e B

eh

avio

r

Pro

cedu

ral Rigo

rDevelopment

OperationsC

rea

tive

Be

ha

vio

r

Pro

cedu

ral Rigo

rDevelopment Cross over –DevOps

Waterfall

Process

Platform

Agile

Delivery

Process

Platform

Blended roles and repeated operations


Customers

Desire for fast

and continuous

innovation

Line of Business

Requirements

Dev & Test

Teams

Code & Tests

Operations

Team

Business

Services

1st

Gap

2nd

Gap

Delivery Challenges

Today’s business and technical needs are

pushing traditional delivery approaches to the

breaking point

People

Process

Information


With only Agile Development improvements…

Agile

Dev

CI builds are piling up

Functional

Testing

Acceptance

Testing

Production

Operator

Setup (weeks)

Install

Test and Ops teams have increased pressures to keep up with increased loads but continue to use waterfall approaches and traditional tools.


The Application Release Process

• Deploy to Development

– Test

• Deploy to QA

– Test

• Deploy to

Production

– Go home

Plans and documentation

– Run book of manual steps

– Spreadsheet record and assignment

– Project plan for dependencies

Manual network configuration

– Traffic rerouting

– Load balancer switch off

Deploy application to servers

– Scripted operation

Manually validate script execution

Further script execution

Manual approval for final switch over

– Email manager for approval

File documentation


Application Release Automation – Delivery

• Automate repetitive tasks - saving labour costs• Build automation

• Quality Management and Test Automation

• Configuration Management

• Discover defects earlier in the lifecycle - reducing the repair costs• Requirements Analysis and Management

• Code Scanning

• Modeling and Model-driven development

• Lower the risk - decreasing the variance of software projects• Standardized software processes

• Traceability through Integration

Efficiency

Productivity

Predictability


Total Cost of Ownership Breakdown

Infrastructure Support and Administration

Software Maintenance Fees

Cost of Implementation

Software Licenses

Startup Costs

Cost of Operations

Hardware Acquisition

Code MaintenanceTotal Cost of Ownership

Application Upgrades

Design/Build/Test14%

1%

3%

3%

10%

27%

21%

79%

27%

15%

Application Release : 83 %


Improving Application Deployment Processes

• Take control of resources

– Lower the administrative burden of environment management

– Increase re-use and availability

– Quickly ramp up or ramp down system scale using different environment profiles

• Implement consistent processes across all environments

– Validate the automation early and drive through to production

• Lock down resources

– Use a consistent and efficient approach to deployment, log access, system

inspection

• Apply a layer of security and governance to deployment

– Control environment access

– Control who deploys

– Provide wide visibility of deployment inventory

• Simplify access to complex functionality within your servers and application

environments

– Plugin ecosystem for detailed system access


Improving Application Release Processes

• Take control of the release plan

– Provide a blend of the essential manual tasks and automated

deployments

– Provide accurate statistics on progress, issues, delays and

responsibilities

– Share a common database centric view of the live plan during a release

– Facilitate automated feedback of changes to a running plan to the

master plan template

• Manage the application pipeline

– A wider view of the portfolio of applications that are released as a unit

– Qualitative control of what content progresses to which environment

• Environment management

– Control system access

– Blackout periods, system unavailability

– Reservation


Questions

Contact Details

Paul Hancock

[email protected]

+44 07733 595001

@paul_ranger4

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.twitter.com/paul_ranger4


Next Steps

Breakfast Briefing

“Making DevOps Pay”Early 2015 – date TBC

The Royal Exchange, London

UrbanCode and Green Hat Open Days - Q1 2015

IBM South Bank

DevOps Maturity Assessment

How DevOps is Accelerating the Gaming Industry

Technology

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