Daily Fantasy Sports & Esports app improves infrastructure scalability and licensing with an automated custom AWS Control Tower pipeline

AWS Foundations

Migrations

Infrastructure & DevOps Modernization

ThriveFantasy now has Well-Architected foundations to build out their future development on AWS. With AWS native tooling, there is a secure, automated process for their team and organization to scale their business and grow their AWS footprint efficiently and securely.

ThriveFantasy is a Daily Fantasy Sports & Esports app for the US & Canadian markets covering sports such as Soccer, Cricket, Hockey & Football. By focusing solely on top-tier athletes from each sport while streamlining the drafting process, they have created an engaging daily fantasy sports game that even the casual sports fan can enjoy.

Challenge

ThriveFantasy recognized that to effectively scale on AWS at the rate needed to support their customers, they would need the right account foundations and automations in place to ensure smooth and efficient operation. ThriveFantasy was also looking to create a white label environment that could be tailored towards specific clients, for which the right AWS account foundation setup would be necessary. Knowledge transfer on key AWS foundational services was also critical as the team looked to fundamentally change their operations management and ensure they know how to build effectively on AWS from this secure baseline.

Solution

ThriveFantasy and Caylent worked together to understand the deployment needs and build a customized automated AWS Control Tower deployment pipeline. Leveraging our Control Tower Caylent Catalyst™, the Caylent team helped ThriveFantasy streamline the management of their AWS Landing Zone, giving them a secure, compliant multi-account foundation & allowing them to quickly spin-up additional accounts, consolidate billing, group accounts, and apply policies to those groups. Multi account and organizational units were developed and assigned, ensuring ThriveFantasy has the foundation to securely grow their AWS presence.

To manage access further, AWS SSO is enabled for the organization. Built-in AWS Control Tower guardrails, specific to ThriveFantasy’s needs, were implemented on AWS. VPC using code was introduced to the AWS environment to improve automation and boost the network’s resiliency.

In this partnership, knowledge transfer was just as important as the actual infrastructure being developed. ThriveFantasy understood that to make the best use of their new AWS foundations, their team would have to understand how to use it and grow with it. The first step in this process was to work closely with the DevOps team and leadership team to determine if everyone was comfortable with the AWS Control Tower setup for their specific needs. From there it was critical that the Caylent engineering team worked hand-in-hand with ThriveFantasy to educate the team concurrently as we built the solution.

Our experts conducted regular standups and our team was always available to enable the ThriveFantasy team. Additionally, the ThriveFantasy team was provided with thorough documentation, explanation, and reviews of the new Well-Architected foundational services, ensuring they were well equipped to operate the solution after the engagement. Most importantly, Caylent understood the importance of implementing the solution prior to Thrive’s next annual business-critical event and worked with their schedules to efficiently complete the project.

Results

ThriveFantasy now has Well-Architected foundations to build out their future development on AWS. With AWS native tooling, there is a secure, automated process for their team and organization to scale their business and grow their AWS footprint efficiently and securely. The AWS Control Tower implementation allows their team to effectively manage the provisioning, security and data access of individual accounts, allowing them to offer whitelabelled application environments to their clients.

They now have a code driven environment which enables automation, scalability & security features that will effectively support their expansion on AWS. Their new centralized governance implementation, enables people in leadership to delegate tasks & keep track of progress. Additionally, it provides a central source to update and make future changes. There is now transparency and accountability with any updates or changes for security groups or other key security features. With consolidated billing, ThriveFantasy can understand where their cost drivers are and get a single pane of glass visibility on their entire system.