Fast, Accurate Processing with AWS for a Live Gaming Loyalty Program

Overview

Loyalty programs are an excellent way to maintain and grow a company’s reach. Customers feel valued when they achieve reward status, and become more devoted to the brand. But not all loyalty programs are created alike, and each comes with its own set of challenges.

Under the Hood of a Loyalty Program

Consumer-facing apps and websites gather “click-stream” data from users: individual messages to describe what each user is doing on the site. A busy site may generate millions of these messages a day, adding up to hundreds of millions each month.

When an American operator of live online sports betting released a new mobile application and wanted to integrate it with its existing loyalty program, the number of moving parts created a lot of complexity.

The client wanted to leverage its clickstream data as input to the existing loyalty program, and wanted to complete the integration as quickly as possible. Developers at the sports betting company needed to coordinate the integration on a tight deadline.

Solution: Fast and Accurate Processing With AWS

With very little time to get the job done, the client knew that Chariot’s team of experts would be able to handle a complex task on deadline. The priorities were reliability, simplified updates, and scalability. Chariot took a serverless approach.

While the gaming company’s back end team added events to existing Twilio Segment “click stream” data, the Chariot team leveraged several cloud-based AWS products. An AWS Kinesis Data Stream was set up to receive data, and Chariot created a series of three AWS Lambda functions to process the information.

Three independent cloud-based Lambda functions to process aligned with a database to coordinate actions. The first Lambda read events from the Kinesis stream, preserving those that were relevant to the loyalty program. The second applied business logic to those events, creating credit records. The third posted those credit records to the company’s existing service, capturing and retrying on error.

Result: Rapid Deployment on Deadline

In ten days, the Chariot team was able to deliver a system that handled production traffic without failure, even when the legacy loyalty server rejected updates due to load. The gaming company had a much clearer picture of user activities, and was able to aggregate user data not just through each individual click, but with an overall view of activity and dollars spent. The integration was seamless.


Technologies Used

  • Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
  • AWS Lambda
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
  • Twilio Segment Kinesis Integration
  • Terraform

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