In poker, prior to the start of a big match or a tournament, tables fill up rapidly, traffic can spike from calm to chaos in a matter of seconds. Auto-scaling is the feature that helps you to keep your site fast, stable, and firm, saving cost, time, and efforts.

What Is An Auto-Scaling Feature?

Auto-scaling is a cloud feature that adds servers at a time when traffic spikes and removes them when it dips. Think of it like lanes opening on a highway during peak times and the traffic is normal. It is widely adopted by the gaming companies for its flexibility, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness. Simply put, it controls carbon emissions as we move towards a greener world, by putting idle servers to sleep when the traffic is low. Major clouds do this automatically for their virtual machines through managed instance groups/auto scaling groups and containers via Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscale.

When Do Poker Sites See Traffic Increase?

• Before deadlines: Everyone would be making last-minute changes to their team based on the line-ups
• During tournament starts: Millions of players may join the tables within a matter of seconds?
• Live scoring time: The real-time updates can snag players back at the same time.
• Offers & promotions: Sudden promotions can attract thousands of players at the same time

Most of these surges are predictable and consistently happen, which is why these websites must be prepared to scale up to handle these.

How Does Auto-Scaling Work Actually?

• The idea is to measure the load on a consistent basis and then add or remove server
• The important metrics to watch being CPU, Requests per second (RPS), p95 latency, and queue depth
• During instances where metrics go above the threshold, the set-up spins new servers (horizontal scaling) or adds more resources. When traffic reduces, it scales down

Horizontal Vs. Vertical Scaling – What To Go For & Which Is Better?

• Horizontal scaling = During spikes, it adds more machines or containers. This is the common practice deployed by most poker
• Vertical Scaling – Provides more CPU or RAM to one particular machine. It’s just a short-term measure and has limitations

To handle scaling perfectly, horizontal scaling is the perfect way to go and is also widely adopted.

What Must Constitute Your Auto-Scaling Set Up?

• Load balancer: It’s very important as it redirects players to healthy servers so no single server gets affected
• Caching: Stores very important data data like lobby lists and line-ups as required for instant reads
• CDN: Delivers static content (images, avatars) from the edge to decrease the load on servers
• Event queue: Handles all the new incoming events like joins and bets, so the backend doesn’t get crushed.
• Database scaling: Read replicas, sharding, or utilizing optimized schemas to deal with high write/read rates
• Kubernetes HPA/Tools: Tools that add or remove servers or pods based on the current metrics
• Monitoring and Observing: Track latency, errors, and scaling actions p55, p99, and error rates.
• WAF / DDoS protection: Stops automated faked traffic and bots from forcing unwanted scaling

These elements combine together to make your poker website, a resilient and scalable platform.

How To Keep The Scaling Costs Under Control?

Use scheduled scaling for known peak times like described in the above situations:

• Run less important workloads on pre-emptive instances to cut down cost
• Ensure you set cooldown period so that system does not keep crashing by adding and removing serves
• Do not overprovision and ensure right size instances

Common Mistakes That You Must Avoid During This Process

• Scaling only on CPU by ignoring latency and queue depth
• Without cache for hot reads, it causes database overload and crash
• Letting bots trigger scale – add rate limits and WAF rules.
• Poor monitoring means inviting trouble

How Gamiotech Can Help Your Poker Site In Autoscaling?

Gamiotech has several years of experience in development of scalable and high-performance gaming platforms and has already applied auto-scaling to poker web sites and can accommodate millions of users at once with an excellent track record of no downtime. With a proven record of having provided autoscaling services like load balancing, caching, and optimization of the clouds, we can guarantee that your platform will remain fast, stable, and affordable handling all kinds of traffic. Partnering with us puts you one step ahead of your competitors

Conclusion

Auto-scaling is not some rocket science or indecipherable magic, it’s just a mix of the right metrics, efficient planning with the right tools. It is especially very important for poker sites to avoid server breakage and save costs.  

Frequently Asked Questions