© Carbon60 Operating Co LTD
© Carbon60 Operating Co LTD
PokerStars, a brand within Flutter Entertainment, teamed up with AWS Premier Tier Partner OpsGuru to modernize the backend systems powering PokerStars, one of the world’s largest online poker platforms. Supporting millions of players globally, PokerStars recognized the opportunity to evolve its global infrastructure to achieve greater agility, resilience, and delivery speed while simplifying management. OpsGuru helped PokerStars design and execute a phased migration strategy tailored to PokerStars’ scale and complexity, while PokerStars invested in internal training to grow AWS fluency across its engineering teams. The result: a modern cloud platform supporting more than 65 percent of PokerStars’ backend applications, a 40 percent boost in production change rates, and a confident, cloud-ready engineering culture.
PokerStars averages 850,000 hands dealt every hour, reaching 3.4 million players across 140 countries, making it the world's largest poker platform. Supporting this global scale relied on 33 data centers distributed worldwide, with sprawling vendor contracts and a mix of infrastructure models built up over years of growth. This legacy footprint successfully delivered stability and performance to millions of players but also introduced operational complexity. Managing upgrades across such a broad environment required significant coordination, and disaster recovery varied between sites. As PokerStars planned for future expansion and new product launches, and its infrastructure approached end-of-life, leadership identified cloud migration as a way to unify operations, strengthen resilience, and accelerate delivery cycles.
The challenge was as much architectural as operational. PokerStars relied on more than 1,100 backend applications that carried deep interdependencies developed over years of scale. This meant migration had to be approached carefully to avoid business disruption. “Some of these systems were practically inseparable,” said Dmitry Kuklin, Head of Site Reliability Engineering at Flutter. “A disruption in one system had the potential to ripple through and affect multiple business functions.” For engineers who had spent years building and maintaining the platform, migration represented not just a technical shift but a cultural one: an opportunity to adopt new tools, embrace automation, and gain the confidence to deliver faster in a modern cloud environment.
After a year of assessing scalability, performance, and platform compatibility, PokerStars selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support PokerStars’ complex backend infrastructure. Recognizing the scale and sensitivity of the migration, AWS recommended OpsGuru—an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with deep experience in replatforming tightly coupled, business-critical applications. OpsGuru provided both hands-on engineering expertise and the strategic guidance that PokerStars needed to move quickly without compromising platform integrity.
To keep the lift manageable, OpsGuru helped PokerStars organize the migration into four waves, grouped by application complexity, technical sensitivity, and portability. This phased approach gave PokerStars time to gain momentum by starting with lower-risk systems systems before scaling up to foundational workloads. PokerStars and OpsGuru worked side-by-side to define architectural patterns upfront, automate key deployment steps with Terraform, and shift PokerStars’s delivery model to Git-based continuous integration and delivery pipelines. Each workload was assessed for high availability, PCI compliance, and portability.
As the phased migration advanced, PokerStars began deploying AWS solutions to modernize infrastructure and streamline operations. PokerStars shifted containerized applications onto Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), reducing operational complexity and accelerating deployments. The team implemented AWS Systems Manager for fleet-wide patching and configuration, minimizing manual effort and freeing engineers for strategic initiatives. To strengthen global connectivity and security, PokerStars integrated AWS Cloud WAN with AWS Network Firewall. They established a multi-account architecture, effectively segmenting workloads to meet stringent compliance requirements. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) now delivers scalable, reliable storage for expanding data volumes, while Amazon CloudWatch provides real-time visibility into performance and application health across regions. All infrastructure components are provisioned using version-controlled, automated pipelines, creating consistency and simplifying testing, promotion, and management.
Alongside the technical buildout, PokerStars invested heavily in its people. “We saw an opportunity to expand our teams’ skills and confidence with AWS,” said Shane Murray, director of infrastructure at PokerStars Entertainment. “We knew the transformation was as much about people as it was about technology.” To close that gap, PokerStars launched an internal Cloud Academy offering AWS-focused training, hands-on labs, and curated learning paths for its engineers. OpsGuru reinforced the effort through embedded coaching and pair programming, working alongside PokerStars' engineers to build confidence and self-sufficiency across teams.
“When you bring in a partner like OpsGuru, someone who truly knows AWS, your team sees what’s possible on the cloud and starts to believe, ‘We can do this too,’” remarked Kuklin. That shift in mindset, paired with a strong technical foundation, set the stage for a successful cloud transformation. Through PokerStars' Cloud Academy, more than 1,200 engineers gained the skills needed to take ownership of their environments, deploy with confidence, and contribute directly to platform improvements. “If you want to upskill 1,200 engineers, you need structure,” said Kuklin. “Cloud Academy gave them a path and people were excited to go through it.”
Even tightly coupled systems transitioned smoothly, benefiting from standardized patterns and automation established early in the migration. With a stable and flexible platform in place, teams are moving faster. Provisioning that once took weeks now happens in hours, and processes like feature testing, service deployment, and infrastructure segmentation execute seamlessly with built-in speed, consistency, and compliance. The impact has been immediate and measurable. Availability rose from 96.5 to 99.9 percent, production change rates jumped by 40 percent, and PokerStars achieved a 30 percent reduction in PokerStars' operational carbon footprint by decommissioning 8 of its 33 global data centers.
This migration marks a major milestone for PokerStars, modernizing a large and complex estate across AWS. Other PokerStars teams are now using the same migration playbook, building on a trusted platform with the skills to move faster and more independently. “We’ve gone from an organization that was cautious about the scale of change ahead,” said Murray, “to an organization that’s proud of what we’ve delivered. And now we’re running PokerStars in the cloud, successfully, at scale.”
