In an industry that is full of buzzwords and terms that people latch onto,
it may not come as a surprise to discover that Light & Wonder industry terms too.
When I joined the business in June 2021, we talked a lot / AWS migrations, automation and many other words that get our attention. As with many other organisations, when you start to scratch beneath the surface, I noticed that we often hear and see two quite different things. We are actually doing a combination of the following
- Cloud Migrations to AWS, however, we used “” with most of our design choices.
- Created DevOps teams but did not adopt a DevOps culture.
- Took our eye away from AWS best practices and costs.
None of the above is uncommon and this is not the first time people have found themselves quoting similar. Another term that is critical to the future growth of any business is “continuous improvement”. This gives us all a direction that we will continue to evolve and adapt to the needs of the business. We must keep products running that serve our customers and find ways to maintain the integrity and availability of our platforms. Sometimes we all wish we could reset and start again …. This is what the anding zone project has given us.
We decided to partner up with AWS professional services to look at how we can leverage Industry expertise working closely alongside our own talent. We took on a 4-week discovery phase to look at our current implementation combined with an overview of many AWS best practices around.
- Security
- Tagging
- Provisioning and Scaling
- Infrastructure as code
- Networking
We concluded that we need to “do things right”. We started the implementation of our next generation “OGS” (Open Gaming System ) stack. It is still early days, but we have started to see the investment in our people come to fruition. We adopt industry recognised approaches to have a fully repeatable and reliable process to everything we do, by leveraging many of the following concepts:
- “Infrastructure as code” (Terraform).
- A true cross-team collaboration (DevOps culture).
- Continuous delivery approach to promoting Infrastructure and application changes.
- Investing in our people and seeing some people adopting modern technologies and ways of operating.
- Continuous feedback – With regular demos we adapt to received feedback and pivot where needed.
We keep an open mind as to how the landing zone will evolve from the original plan. We were approached by other teams to join us on this exciting approach to AWS cloud services. We have managed to onboard new tenants with a “sandbox environment” for the database team to develop and upskill as well as internal focus from our Fusion team to help accelerate against their roadmaps.
From a technical perspective, the landing zone is a framework into which cloud applications are developed and deployed.
To summarise, it is an extremely exciting time for the company to have a solid foundation to (re)build our cloud aspirations. Aligning a clear company vision with the AWS platform and offering certainly paves the way ahead for us all at Light & Wonder.
The opinions expressed in this blog post are strictly those of the author in his personal capacity. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Light & Wonder or of its employees.
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May 17th 2022