Support and maintenance of online casino platform

Introduction

Reliable operation of online casinos requires continuous maintenance processes: preventive monitoring, quick response to incidents, regular updates and testing. Organization of maintenance is the key to maximum uptime, safe growth and satisfaction of both players and operators.

1. Monitoring and alerting

Infrastructure monitoring:

"From under the hood" CPU, memory, disk, network on hosts and containers (Prometheus → Grafana).
Service life cycle sensors (HTTP health-checks, WebSocket readiness, DB pings).

Applied monitoring:

API latency metrics p95/p99, error-rate, number of active sessions.

Alerting and escalation:

Configuring SLA-oriented alerts (p99> 200 ms, 5xx errors> 1%) in PagerDuty/Slack.
Integration with on-call rotation and runbooks for automated response.

2. Incident Management

Incident Management:

Classification (P1-P4), status meta, communication with commands.
Post-mortem procedures: root-cause analysis, RCA reports, SLA reports.

Runbook и playbooks:

Patterns of actions in case of typical failures (memory leak, cluster crash, integration failure).
Automatic recovery scripts (reboot, reassembly of containers, switching to DR environment).

3. Patches and Updates

Versioning:

Monorepo + Git tags, Semantic Versioning for microservices and frontend.

CI/CD-pipeline:

Autotesting (unit, integration, smoke), canary releases, blue/green-deploy.
Automatic rollback during regressions (health-checks failed).

Update dependencies and security:

Regular scan of CVE databases (Dependabot, Snyk), priority patching of critical vulnerabilities.
Staging → performance tests → prod

4. Backup and Recovery

Database backups:

Point-in-time recovery for transactional databases (PostgreSQL WAL, Oracle RMAN).
Hourly diff backups, daily full-shots, weekly archives.

Storage and verification:

Geo-distributed storage in encrypted cloud buckets.
Test restore procedures once a month to validate backups.

Disaster Recovery (DR):

Documented DR plan, RTO/RPO targets (RTO ≤ 1 h, RPO ≤ 15 m).
Replication to the second zone/region, automatic DNS switching.

5. Performance and optimization

Capacity planning:

Analysis of trends in load metrics, planning of resources for marketing campaigns.

Load-testing:

JMeter/Gatling scripts for peak scripts (instant flash spin).
Regular testing after releases and before major promotions.

Base and cache tuning:

Indexes, shardings, partitioning of tables.
Setting up Redis (eviction, persistence) and CDN cache.

6. Safety and compliance

Pentests and audits:

Quarterly external penetration tests, internal code review.

Vulnerability Management:

SLA-oriented high-risk tickets (CVE ≤ 7).

Compliance with standards:

PCI DSS (scan verification, card tokenization), GDPR service (PII data deletion).

Secrets and keys:

Vault/KMS storage, automatic key rotation every 90 days.

7. Documentation and knowledge base

Knowledge Base:

Confluence/Notion with runbooks, architecture diagrams, DR instructions.

Onboarding and training:

Regular "fires" analysis, exchange of experience and training in new tools.

8. SLA and user support

Support levels:

24/7 NOC team, L1-L3 engineers.

Support Metrics:

MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) ≤ 30 м, MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge) ≤ 5 м.

Communication channels:

Integration of the ticket system (Jira Service Management), Slack, e-mail, phone.

Conclusion