Reduced time to market by 50% with more efficient CI/CD pipeline
Previously, each of Kaizen Gaming’s engineers had to manually build environments for code creation and testing. In the pre-production staging environment, a limited number of shared VMs were available, requiring developers to ask others to refrain from overriding the code for several hours while they completed final testing.
Now, with a CI/CD pipeline for new code and ready-to-use task templates provided by Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, Kaizen Gaming’s developers can complete testing in minutes. As a result, Kaizen Gaming has halved its time to market for new applications and features.
“The built-in Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines component gives us a Kubernetes-native framework and continuous integration pipeline that creates a smoother experience for our developers,” said Chrysostomidis. “They just tag the new version of their microservice and only need five or ten minutes in the staging environment to complete their testing and move the project forward.”
Improved scalability for existing and new markets using VMs and OpenShift
Like many multinational organizations, Kaizen Gaming must balance scaling existing applications to continue delivering reliable experiences with support for business expansion to new locations. The autoscale capabilities built into Red Hat OpenShift let the company spin up a new VM, then create and store an application in seconds—a process that previously took around 20 minutes with its monolithic legacy architecture.
“Rapidly scaling an application in a virtual environment is quite challenging, but we can now scale our bonus platform a hundred times faster—and much easier,” said Chrysostomidis. “And for memory-intensive applications, we can simply increase the CPU and memory limits in just a couple of seconds to ensure high performance even when request volumes grow rapidly. For example, we see traffic increases during promotions for specific sporting events.”
Kaizen Gaming has also taken advantage of new multicluster capabilities included in Red Hat OpenShift 4 to bring workloads closer to clients, further optimizing service performance.
“With this version of Red Hat OpenShift, we can deploy a cluster in every country where we operate,” said Chrysostomidis. “We can also build smaller segments of code, then isolate them on a country-by-country or brand basis to improve latency or response times. Being able to deliver a consistent gaming experience, no matter where a customer is located, is key to expanding our business.”
Optimized new work approach with expert guidance
Ongoing support from experienced technology consultants has helped Kaizen Gaming continue to optimize its microservices architecture and modern development processes.
“Red Hat Consulting brought us all their experience with OpenShift design and installation,” said Karayiannidis. “With their help, we can run our workloads smoothly in our new production environment—and get quick answers to any questions or issues. People and teamwork are the most valuable aspect of working with Red Hat.”