All-In on Innovation: The Winamax Poker Platform
summary
Winamax's platform history: started with C++ microservices using OpenMQ and disk-backed event batching that caused months of instability, then faced massive growth from the Expresso game (68k games/day first year, COVID peak ~20M hands/day) which led to adopting Kafka to decouple processing and enable worker groups. After a 2019 DDoS (~700 Gbps) they migrated anti‑DDoS and gateways to AWS and now run MSK, Fargate, RDS/Aurora, S3 with a unified React/Electron client, achieving better scalability, simpler deployments, and fewer infrastructure night shifts.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:25Who is Winamax
- 3:29Initial platform development
- 9:48Game client architecture
- 13:40Product innovation race
- 16:07Kafka migration
- 21:25Cloud migration
- 26:48Confinement impact
- 32:44Game client evolution
- 36:37New tech challenges
- 38:28Q&A
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