AWS, Kubernetes and everything under the product
Infrastructure architecture for regulated iGaming
iGaming infrastructure carries an unusual pair of demands: it has to stay up during a peak it cannot fully predict, and it has to be explainable to an auditor months later. Argon designs, builds and hardens cloud platforms that do both on the world-renowned providers the largest operators already run on, with infrastructure as code, observability that shortens incidents, and a cost model that does not quietly double.
01
Where teams get stuck
- The cloud bill grew faster than the revenue
- Over-provisioned clusters, idle non-production environments, cross-zone traffic and forgotten snapshots. The waste is usually 20 to 40 percent and it is recoverable without risk.
- Deploys are a held breath
- No staging parity, manual steps, no rollback, and a release window chosen to minimise the number of people watching. Deployment fear slows everything upstream of it.
- Incidents last hours because nobody can see
- Logs in three places, no traces, alerts that fire on symptoms rather than causes, and a dashboard nobody trusts at three in the morning.
iGaming consideration
A tournament finish, a jackpot or a marketing send produces a step change in concurrency. Autoscaling has to be tested against that shape, not against a smooth daily curve.
02
What we do
- Cloud foundation and account structure
- Multi-account landing zone, organisational units, guardrails, SSO and least-privilege IAM, so production access is deliberate and reviewable.
- Compute and orchestration
- EKS or ECS with sane node groups and autoscaling, resource budgets, pod disruption and health probes that do not restart a healthy service under load.
- Networking and edge
- VPC design, private connectivity, VPN access for operations, CloudFront, WAF rules, DDoS posture and geographic blocking enforced at the edge rather than in the app.
- Data platform
- MongoDB Atlas, Aurora and PostgreSQL sizing and topology, read replicas, connection pooling, index strategy, backup and point-in-time recovery that has actually been restore-tested.
- Streaming and integration infrastructure
- MSK and Kafka topology, partitioning, retention, consumer group design, and dead-letter handling for the events your business reports on.
- Infrastructure as code and CI/CD
- Terraform modules with a real state strategy, environment parity, blue-green or canary releases, automated rollback and a pipeline that is the only way to change production.
- Observability and on-call
- Metrics, logs and traces in one place. Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry and Sentry wired together, service level objectives that reflect player experience, and alerting routed to a human who can act.
- Resilience and disaster recovery
- Failure-mode analysis, recovery objectives agreed with the business, documented runbooks, and a recovery exercise that proves the plan rather than describing it.
- Cost engineering
- Right-sizing, savings plans, storage lifecycle, environment scheduling and per-service cost attribution, so growth in spend is a decision rather than a surprise.
- Security hardening
- Secrets management, KMS and encryption posture, image scanning, network policy, audit logging, and the evidence pack a penetration test or certification asks for.
03
What you receive
- Reference architecture for the full estate, environment by environment
- Terraform modules and pipelines, with production changeable only through code review
- Observability stack in place: dashboards, service level objectives and routed alerts
- Runbooks for deploy, rollback, scale, restore and the top incident scenarios
- Disaster recovery plan with recovery objectives, plus the result of a real recovery test
- Cost model with a named list of savings and the work each one takes
04
How the work runs
01
Audit
Read the accounts, the code, the bill and the incident history. Produce a single current-state picture, with the risks ranked.
02
Target design
Reference architecture sized to real traffic and real compliance obligations, with the trade-offs written down.
03
Quick wins first
The low-risk, high-return items go first: cost recovery, alerting gaps, backup verification, access hygiene.
04
Build
Infrastructure as code, environment by environment, non-production first, each change reviewed and reversible.
05
Cut over
Blue-green or phased migration with a rehearsed rollback, executed in a window the business agrees to.
06
Hand over
Runbooks, a walkthrough with your team, and a support period while your engineers take the keys.
05
Why iGaming differs
- Peak is event-driven, not seasonal
- A tournament finish, a jackpot or a marketing send produces a step change in concurrency. Autoscaling has to be tested against that shape, not against a smooth daily curve.
- Certification and audits want evidence
- Change control, access logs, segregation of duties and data residency get inspected. Designing for the evidence pack up front removes weeks from every audit cycle.
- Geographic restriction belongs at the edge
- Blocking a jurisdiction inside the application means the application has already accepted the request. Edge enforcement is cheaper, faster and far easier to prove.
06
Tools and methods
- AWS
- EKS · ECS · MSK · Aurora · CloudFront · WAF · Route 53 · KMS · S3
- Infrastructure as code
- Terraform · Helm · Argo CD · GitHub Actions · Jenkins
- Observability
- Grafana · Loki · Prometheus · OpenTelemetry · Sentry · CloudWatch
- Data
- MongoDB Atlas · PostgreSQL · Redis · ElastiCache
- Typical team
- Infrastructure architect, 1 to 3 platform engineers
07
Questions
Which cloud do you work on?
All of the world-renowned providers, and we are equally happy in a hybrid or provider-hosted estate. Our deepest production mileage is on AWS, so that is where we move fastest, and we will tell you honestly where our depth sits rather than claiming parity everywhere.
Can you cut our cloud bill?
Usually yes, and we will quantify the opportunity in the audit before you commit to the work. Recent comparable engagements have recovered mid-hundreds of dollars per month on small estates and materially more on larger ones, with no availability trade-off.
Will you carry the pager?
We can, as a defined augmented-team engagement with an agreed rota, escalation path and response target. What we will not do is take on-call responsibility for a platform we have no authority to change.
We are mid-migration and it has stalled. Can you help?
Yes, and that is a common starting point. First a short assessment of what is done, what is half done and what is actually blocking, then a decision on whether to complete, reshape or reverse it. Stalled migrations usually need a decision more than they need more hands.
Related
- Engagements
- Under NDA as standard
- People
- Background-checked engineers
- Data
- GDPR and DPA ready
- Infrastructure
- World-renowned cloud providers
Next step
Tell us what you are building, or what you are about to buy.
One working day to a reply, from an engineer rather than an account manager. Under NDA as standard, before anything is shared.