The long road: Global Gaming development chief on technology in expansion

It’s no secret that an online gambling operator’s technology is the heart and soul of its operations and product. When it comes to scaling up a business that is experiencing rapid growth, the key to getting it right and not falling behind is in its technology.

This has certainly been the case for Global Gaming, the Malmö-based operator that sprung onto the scene in 2017 and has since earned itself the 40th spot in the EGR Power 50 rankings for 2018 and Operator of the Year at the 2019 EGR Nordics Awards.

The company made a name for itself as the first to offer its Swedish players a quick withdrawal and no-registration casino via payments provider Trustly’s Pay N Play function. But it is clear the firm is now striving to build a reputation beyond Pay N Play as tech-first, agile and ready for global expansion.

And as part of their efforts, the development team was tasked with carrying out a mammoth platform upgrade towards the end of last year. EGR Technology sat down with Global Gaming’s head of development Duncan Snaith and development manager Mark Cilia for an in-depth insight into the process and how customers were impacted during the project.

Duncan Snaith, head of development and Mark Cilia, development manager

EGR Technology: How was the process of updating and renewing the front-end platform? How long was the roadmap and did you face any challenges in the process?

Duncan Snaith (DS): Firstly, I would like to be clear that this was not just a new front-end framework and large parts of our platform and infrastructure have also undergone development. The front-end is obviously only the part which our players see.

Mark Cilia (MC): The front-end platform had to be completely rebuilt as we were transitioning from a traditional application (which required calls to the server for each page request) into a single-page application.

Single-page applications provide a much better experience for players, especially on mobile, but that meant we had to build a new API service for the front-end to connect to also. In total this took around nine months of development with the biggest challenge being adapting the Pay N Play model into a single page application.

EGR Technology: How challenging was it to build and develop parts of the technology between three offices in different countries? How did you communicate and ensure you were all on the right page?

MC: All the teams shared our technical vision and wanted to build this new platform, so aligning the development teams was never really an issue. Dividing parts of our platform into more granular components and domains also allowed different teams to focus on each of these. This allowed us to hit the perfect sweet spot for maximum productivity.

DS: We used tools including Slack and MS Teams. Regular team meet-ups did also help for those issues which were better discussed face-to-face and for hammering ideas together. The agile development methodology is about working with remote teams so it was not too great a problem. We do have some very strong scrum masters though who were invaluable in keeping things organised.

EGR Technology: What was the main reasoning behind the move to build a new front-end platform? How will it help you cope with multiple markets and providers in future?

DS: The expansion into new markets was one of the driving reasons for building the new platform, particularly the new front-end application. Previously our brands each used their own frameworks or variations of a codebase and this was proving too labour intensive to update. Last year’s implementation of GDPR first showed us this and we learned from this experience.

Our new platform allows the easy creation of bespoke casino brands, each with unique features and customer experience, without greatly effecting the underlying code. This allows for functionality which must be standardised (as part of a licence requirement) to be built once and shared, while also allowing each brand to be individual. As part of technical demonstration we have already proven the value the platform can give us.

At the start of the presentation, a volunteer was asked to suggest a name, colour scheme, and user interface style for a hypothetical new casino. By the end of the presentation, a member of our development team had been able to build and launch this new casino according to their requirements. This was a fully operational casino available for everyone to log in, deposit, and play.

EGR Technology: Where did you draw inspiration from when building the new platform?

DS: For the back-end platform we looked at many top cloud or SaaS products from a range of different industries. Although many of these were not related to egaming, we thought we could learn from any product which required high-availability and handled large traffic. Happily, many of the ideas also came from the team themselves. We have a lot of passionate people on the development team who have great knowledge and experience. They all contributed towards making a great product.

MC: Tech blogs and tech conferences were also great resources. Our development teams very much enjoy the Domain Driven Design approach for building applications.

EGR Technology: Was it always in Global Gaming’s plans to update its front-end or is it the result of rapid growth and huge demand for the product?

DS: The market has shown that to remain competitive, a company must always continue to innovate and improve. The new front-end was only the first step in a redevelopment and upgrade of our full platform. There are a great many other developments already in progress. To be able to bring these new features to our players we needed a front-end which could support these. This was one of the reasons why we focused on this first.

Global Gaming’s development team

EGR Technology: What were some of the challenges faced (from a technology perspective) in launching in the new Swedish market? Did Global Gaming benefit from the fact it already had a hub in Malmö?

DS: Because the SGA requirements were so new, there were always going to be challenges involved in implementing these, as no one had done this before. Many of these requirements were very specific and we wanted to make sure we understood these fully before beginning to build these features. Certainly having a Swedish office and having some of our development teams based there proved to be a great asset. We could not have done this project without them.

EGR Technology: Can you offer a more indepth insight into the makeup of the platform?

MC: The front-end application is built on React using an atomic structure for its components. A Redux data-architecture is also used for storing the application state. We also built a number of our own NPM modules for core functionality as this provided an easy way to encapsulate this and maintain different versions. Compilation and bundling is done using Babel and Webpack, and our testing through Webdriver, Jest, and Enzyme. The API layer was developed in a truly micro-service-driven approach. It was important for us that this remains a thin, stateless and asynchronous layer so we opted to utilise Node.js.

EGR Technology: What are the main differences to the consumer-facing site following the platform update?

MC: The new front-end framework has significantly improved page load times and numerous usability enhancements. The previous site was not designed as ‘mobile-first’ and this was a key concern so the new front-end was optimised for mobile browsers and for use over 3G/4G networks.

DS: There are also many key features which you cannot see – the new front-end is a much improved platform to test and launch new features. It’s as much about giving the developers and teams the platform they need to build a great casino product as it is about giving the player a great casino experience.

EGR Technology: How did you avoid any downtime in the development and changeover?

DS: Downtime was always going to be needed during the redevelopment; this was understood from the beginning. Our focus was on minimising this as much as possible. One of the first tasks we planned was how to replicate our production infrastructure as closely as possible for use during development. Also having these multiple identical environments which we could build, test and troubleshoot on proved invaluable.

MC: A strong testing suite which entailed UNIT, end-to-end, and integration tests was developed to ensure stability during development. As well as part of our Continuous Integration, this was automated to run on all environments and send alerts to Slack channels if any issues were found.

EGR Technology: How will the new platform accommodate the rapidly growing company and your future plans?

MC: It allows for greater modularity, flexibility, and the ability for autonomous teams to work in parallel. New ideas can be prototyped quickly, built into full new features, tested and deployed instantly. Split-testing was another key requirement for us and is a core part of the platform. Ultimately we wanted to build a great platform to allow innovation.

EGR Technology: How many people were involved in the development of the new front-end platform?

DS: In total around 40 developers worked on this project. This was not just the new front-end platform; large amounts of work were also done by back-end, DevOps, and infrastructure teams.

EGR Technology: How will the company’s different operational teams benefit from the new platform and new tools incorporated into it?

DS: So far this is only the first step and very much the foundation of what we’ve built so far. Again, we follow the agile method of first delivering a product, which is constantly improved with continued and iterative development. What we have done is provided a platform where we can integrate new tools quickly and easily. These integrations are all planned over the coming months.

EGR Technology: Where is the physical technology based?

DS: For licensing requirements large parts of our platform had to have physical servers hosted within a data centre in Estonia. While the hosting was a licence requirement, what was interesting was how we chose to utilise the server architecture; our infrastructure and DevOps teams implemented some really cool stuff here. Instead of the traditional architecture of services running directly on hardware, they approached this more towards building a cloud service. This has worked out very well for us. Our long-term goal had always been to build more of an organic, self-healing system and already we were able to implement parts of this. It is showing great benefits.