From the Gaming Scalability event, June 2009 in London (http://gamingscalability.org). This talk is an experience report from a recent online gaming project involving an extensive use of cloud and grid technologies. Gojko presents the benefits that his team got from a cloud deployment, such as low up-front costs and easy infrastructure provisioning and challenges and surprises including storage and monitoring issues. He then presents architectural impacts of using computing grids to power online casino games and talks about benefits, issues and challenges of gigaspace computing grids in a cloud deployment. Gojko Adzic is a software craftsman with a passion for new technologies, programming and writing. He got involved with the online casino industry in 2002 and has since worked for leading UK online betting systems and some of the world's largest poker networks.

1. Casino in the clouds
Gojko Adzic
Advanced Games Lab
gadzic@advancedgameslab.com
@gojkoadzic
www.AdvancedGamesLab.com
www.AbsoluteCasino.com

2. The world's first social casino gaming network
s

3. Why clouds?
 Eliminate waste
 Very high target volume
 Scale up and down and save on infrastructure
 Provide better service faster and cheaper

4. Are we spending our time doing
stuff that really matters?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sathwick/451847158

5. Eliminate waste
http://www.flickr.com/photos/antoniele/2930240461

6. Very high target volume
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreadfuldan/746297725

7. Flexibility to scale up or down
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bocavermelha/12105189

8. Cloud economics: we develop and
deploy faster and cheaper – so we
have a competitive edge

9. Challenges and surprises
 Monitoring
 Load balancing
 Shared storage
 Pre-packaged systems
 Security

10. Monitoring – no more flashing lights!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mumpfpuffel/2342924629

11. Load balancing –
not your usual Cisco story
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtbl/19039168

12. Network storage: only one at a time
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dexell1827/2798949753/

13. Pre-packaged systems: always read
the label
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gx9/2276704055

14. Security: How much can we trust
them to do a good job?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/p_h/2461925124

15. 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

16. No more simple fail-over
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamingkaettchen/103890429

17. 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

18. Why we chose GigaSpaces?
 Pay-per-use on the cloud
 Fully transactional
 Cloud support
 Automated deployment tools
 SLA for the grid

19. 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

20. 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

21. Why not use this for production as well
to scale it on demand?
 Security
 Regulatory requirements

22. Learn how to be friends ...

23. 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

24. 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

25. What I'd like to see in the future
 Open Source grids
 SLAs for the cloud
 Solutions for regulatory/security issues