Platform Support and Maintenance
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).
- API latency metrics p95/p99, error-rate, number of active sessions.
- 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.
- 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.
- Autotesting (unit, integration, smoke), canary releases, blue/green-deploy.
- Automatic rollback during regressions (health-checks failed).
- 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.
- Geo-distributed storage in encrypted cloud buckets.
- Test restore procedures once a month to validate backups.
- 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.
- JMeter/Gatling scripts for peak scripts (instant flash spin).
- Regular testing after releases and before major promotions.
- 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.
- SLA-oriented high-risk tickets (CVE ≤ 7).
- PCI DSS (scan verification, card tokenization), GDPR service (PII data deletion).
- Vault/KMS storage, automatic key rotation every 90 days.
7. Documentation and knowledge base
Knowledge Base:- Confluence/Notion with runbooks, architecture diagrams, DR instructions.
- 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.
- MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) ≤ 30 м, MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge) ≤ 5 м.
- Integration of the ticket system (Jira Service Management), Slack, e-mail, phone.
Conclusion
The organization of support and maintenance of the casino platform requires an integrated approach: constant monitoring, clear incident management processes, automated CI/CD for secure updates, regular backups with DR procedures, continuous performance testing and compliance with safety standards. This guarantees high availability, protection against risks and confidence of operators and players in the stability of the platform.