BlueRibbon develops marketing, player engagement and user retention solutions for the iGaming industry, its most unique solution being customizable jackpot promotions which enable brands to differentiate themselves according to their player profiles and business needs.
Leveraging AllCloud’s DevOps-as-a-Service and ongoing FinOps support, BlueRibbon has modernized its cloud container environment and infrastructure to Amazon EKS and accelerated its CI/CD process to keep up with the startup’s rapid growth, while remaining cost-efficient and aligned with AWS best practices.
As a SaaS company, providing real-time, traffic-sensitive services to the iGaming industry, BlueRibbon is heavily reliant on optimal traffic routing, real-time responsiveness and cost-optimal utilization of cloud resources.
“Given the nature of the gaming industry, BlueRibbon has to provide uninterrupted 24\7 service, tolerate extreme throughput requirements during peak hours, and comply with a wide array of regulatory guidelines while safeguarding a multitude of monetary transactions per day. Consequently, well-designed DevOps pipelines are crucial for our ongoing success.”
During 2020, BlueRibbon experienced rapid growth, doubling its expected user acquisition pace for the year. As a result, BlueRibbon had to quickly broaden its DevOps footprint and access highly skilled professionals to maintain and scale its cloud-native technologies.
Since the beginning of its engagement in early 2020, AllCloud has been working closely with BlueRibbon’s development team and provides the startup with DevOps as-a-service and cloud-cost governance support. To accommodate BlueRibbon’s rapid growth, AllCloud has adjusted the company’s architecture to better comply with AWS best practices, modernized its container infrastructure and improved its security posture, while offering ongoing and proactive cloud cost optimization services.
While managing BlueRibbon’s environment, AllCloud’s DevOps engineers realized that BlueRibbon was utilizing docker containers according to best practice, but lacked a sufficient orchestration tool that could help them better realize the full potential of their microservices. To provide better scalability, granular control over traffic routing and improved cost-efficiency, AllCloud implemented its Easy EKS solution to migrate BlueRibbon to a Kubernetes orchestration platform within AWS, allowing them to speed up deployments and to run multiple containers on a single ec2 instance.
Easy EKS is AllCloud’s Terraform-based Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Kubernetes automation solution, allowing to quickly create, configure and manage Kubernetes clusters on AWS. This solution, in conjunction with AllCloud’s ongoing support and management, allows BlueRibbon to enjoy Kubernetes’ powerful automation, deployment, and scaling capabilities while short-cutting the steep learning curve the system normally requires.
Following the modernization to Kubernetes, AllCloud recommended replacing the CD tools Jenkins and Ansible with Argo, a Kubernetes-native deployment solution that follows the GitOps paradigm, and has integrated Ocean, a Spot by NetApp product, to cost-optimize EKS workloads. AllCloud has also optimized monitors and dashboards agents on BlueRibbon’s already implemented monitoring tools, Garfana and Prometheus. To improve BlueRibbon’s overall security posture, AllCloud has automated security checks and alerts, leveraging Amazon Security Hub.
On the cost-optimization front, AllCloud provides regular weekly optimization meetings with its FinOps analysts to ensure that BlueRibbon’s rapid growth is being accommodated most cost-effectively.
Leveraging AllCloud as their trusted AWS partner and DevOps-as-a-Service provider has helped BlueRibbon to scale fast and expand into additional regions while acquiring new customers rapidly. The ongoing DevOps support guarantees highly efficient CI/CD processes, while the proactive cost optimization guidance ensures that the company’s strict SLA demands are being met cost-effectively.
“Leveraging DevOps-as-a-Service, provided by our experienced partner, AllCloud, has proven to be a very valuable decision. With AllCloud’s assistance and guidance, BlueRibbon has been able to outgrow our own projections while significantly reducing cloud costs and overall overhead. Acquiring the same level of DevOps expertise in-house would have been a challenging undertaking. We’re extremely satisfied that we can instead focus on our product innovation.” Idan Fridman, CTO at BlueRibbon
BlueRibbon’s improved infrastructure has set the stage for continuous innovation, agility and growth. To stay ahead of its curve, BlueRibbon has engaged with AllCloud’s Data team to identify the right data sources and set KPIs to drive future development according to data-driven metrics and goals.