Magellan Robotech ups game for managing hybrid clouds to exceed customer demand

The rapid growth of e-sports and online platforms is changing the gambling landscape across the globe. The market is developing so rapidly that bookmakers need to be able to offer the latest products or risk losing customers to their competition. Magellan Robotech, one of Europes leading developers of customized gaming platforms and services, must be able to get new products to market quickly to stay ahead in a very competitive landscape.

Magellan Robotech was founded in 2014 by the Stanleybet Group, an international bookmaker with over 60 years of experience in the Gaming business, with the aim of exploring new frontiers in gaming and entertainment. They are well known for developing innovative V-Sports, V-Games, casino products and online retail platforms, with end-users experiencing highly sophisticated digital video streams of games and virtual sports. They have a team of more than 150 professionals dedicated to creating bespoke products and services, customized for the needs of every single client.

The problem: How to respond fast enough to market demand for new applications and services?

The gambling industry is hugely competitive and Magellan Robotechs customers are reliant on the company to provide them with the latest innovative gaming products that constantly push the boundaries for virtual gaming. To bring new products to market increasingly faster, Magellan Robotech must be able to provision resources quickly when opportunities arise to develop new gaming services and applications for the market.

Previously Magellan Robotechs test and development systems were housed in legacy data center infrastructure, but they faced constant bottlenecks due to challenges with scalability and agility. They needed to move from legacy waterfall methodologies into a DevOps environment. According to Graham Banner, Head of IT Operations at Magellan Robotech, "We wanted to enable the developers to be able to iterative test, quickly deploy applications, and tear them down and bring them back up again, without a roadblock from the infrastructure team who had a ticket system. This meant developers could wait five days to get hold of services."

The solution: streamline access to multi-cloud resources

The solution was the HPE OneSphere, an as-a-service hybrid cloud management platform. Through a unified view in HPE OneSphere the team at Magellan Robotech can build hybrid clouds capable of supporting both traditional, virtualized, and cloud-native applications, while providing company executives the cost insights they need to make informed business decisions on their cloud utilization. HPE OneSphere equips Magellans developers with application provisioning as-a-service, so that they can focus on creating the industrys leading virtual gaming software.

Getting HPE OneSphere up and running is rapid due to its as-a-Service delivery model. "Within minutes of deploying HPE OneSphere it had automatically discovered our cloud estate. It provided us insights straight away into our environment. We could see how much resources were being consumed, which teams were running them, and how much capacity they needed", says Banner.

It has been a hugely empowering tool for Magellan Robotechs IT team. According to Banner, HPE OneSphere supports our legacy application stack, the current application stack and our future application stack and its a bridge between all these environments across our estate.

With HPE OneSphere, companies can on-board on-premises private cloud resources and provide a cloud-like experience to their users. HPE OneSphere makes it easy for customers like Magellan Robotech to on-board Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure clouds into the HPE OneSphere portal. Then they can choose whether to deploy workloads into either on-prem or public cloud resources via a range of simplified work flows.

Before deploying HPE OneSphere, Magellan was not using the public cloud at all because they didnt feel they had the expertise to harness it effectively. "With HPE OneSphere, we can on-board public cloud services within hours not days or weeks and the developers are able to leverage this service to build what they need with support for whatever tools they want to use within the DevOps environment. There are hundreds of services at their disposal, and this is changing daily, but HPE OneSphere is agnostic so we know any tools will work", says Banner.

"Previously the infrastructure team was a roadblock for developers, but now we are enablers. We provide developers with all the services they need and enable their creativity", continues Banner.

Cost, governance and management transformed

HPE OneSphere makes it easy for customers like Magellan to on-board and manage public cloud usage. AWS or Azure clouds can be quickly and easily added into the HPE OneSphere portal so that customers have a comprehensive view of the cost of consuming different cloud services. Previously Magellan Robotech found cost very difficult to manage. Banner says, "We had no way of really modelling cost against on-premises versus the different offerings in public cloud, so cost tracking was something that was very important to us."

HPE OneSphere is also an important tool when it comes to managing governance and compliance within an IT environment, providing real-time analytics of what is going on across the hybrid cloud estate. Magellan Robotech used to suffer from a siloed approach where developers wouldnt talk to operations and if the IT team didnt respond fast enough, developers would bring in shadow IT. "People would end up spinning up their own services, nobody had control or governance of what was going on and this is obviously a risky business when you're in the gambling sector", says Banner.

Since deploying HPE OneSphere, Magellan Robotech has seen a steep change in the relationship between the internal teams. "We're no longer the bad guys in operations holding them back. There's a lot more collaboration. The frustration the developers had against the operations teams is gone. They're able to do testing, they can test multiple products at the same time. They're very happy now. A happy dev is a good dev", says Banner.

Now with HPE OneSphere, Magellan Robotech has new projects springing up all the time and can provision and deploy applications in minutes.

New OneSphere capabilities

At HPE Discover Madrid 2018, HPE announced improved provisioning, compliance enhancements and new cost insights to HPE OneSphere, designed to give customers even more hybrid cloud management capabilities and drive greater simplicity across their hybrid-cloud estate.

One of the new updates announced was the enhancement of the Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) capabilities, to enable IT to quickly provision Kubernetes clusters on AWS and on-premises VMware environments with just a few clicks. Fully functioning container deployments and microservices can now be deployed automatically to either public or private cloud environments, reducing complexity and inconsistency.

This new ability to provision and managefederatedKubernetes clusters spanning both public and private clouds has caught Magellan Robotechs attention from both an operations and a development perspective, as it will enable workloads to be fully agnostic to their location thus relieving stress from their developers while providing highly resilient and highly responsive services. "As our applications move from legacy monoliths to stateless, cloud ready micro services - this ensures we have the best platforms available for the development team to work with, using whatever toolset they need and will have the expected results regardless of their location," Banner says.

In addition, HPE introduced Bare-Metal-as-a-Service (BMaaS) through HPE OneView automation. This new HPE OneSphere capability, which will be available in January 2019, gives IT operations a simple approach to manage the allocation of bare metal services to ongoing projects across the enterprise, providing a standard interface to HPE infrastructure.