Scaling iGaming Platforms with Golang Microservices

In the development of integrative gaming (iGaming) platforms, it is crucial that services are resilient and can withstand massive user demand without allowing any errors in execution. In this context, the creation of systems using Golang microservices is the most effective technological solution available. In this article, you will learn why and how to create a simple service using this powerful stack.

The Scalability Challenges in iGaming Platforms

The main problem iGaming platforms, such as betting houses, and poker playing platforms, among others, face comes from their huge user base and the level of concurrent access and usage they may experience. During sporting events or when new games are released, massive traffic spikes are likely to occur, and the servers must be able to handle them and remain resilient to avoid significant outages and deliver the best possible experience to users. Additionally, latency is crucial: under heavy usage, the server may become laggy, compromising the fluidity of the user experience. This can lead to customer dissatisfaction and even cause them to abandon the game.

Additionally, the system must also be mindful of security and compliance. With huge usage demands, glitches and bugs tend to appear more frequently and in more serious ways, and sometimes they may become dangerous security flaws that put your entire application at risk. Due to all of this, the system’s 24/7 availability is sometimes seriously compromised, and yet its uptime must remain strong to avoid disturbing the user base. 

So, for a system to be able to withstand all of these challenges, the technology and architecture must be very well-thought-out and well-planned, using modern stacks and providing room for future maintenance. And, in this context, the best option is to use the microservices paradigm to your advantage, creating separate modules for each functional component of your system. In addition, one of the best languages for this is Golang: its performance and security excel during the creation of extremely resource-intensive projects, and it is still very maintainable and easy to apply.

Why Golang is a Perfect Fit for iGaming

Due to the necessity of reliability, security, and performance of modern applications, and interactive gaming (iGaming) most of all, Golang has proven to be a perfect fit for service development. The programming language, developed by Google, is currently one of the most popular and up-to-date in the market, being open-source and free to use, having already conquered a solid market and user base.

Among the many utilities and advantages of Golang development, the most sought-after is its blazing-fast performance. Go is a compiled language, which means that its code gets translated into an intermediary Assembly code and then into the executable binary file for execution. Because of this, your project can have blazing-fast performance, with execution times near that of low-level languages such as C, C++, among others. 

Additionally, Golang offers several other utilities to reduce execution times, making it a language that can handle large packages and input/output operations very well. For instance, it offers native concurrency in an easy-to-apply way, with its goroutines and channels. Because of this, it is very easy to organize tasks to be run simultaneously in different threads, allowing for the concurrent processing of different and heavy chunks of data. With this, the system will utilize fewer resources on your server, optimized for high-demand servers, with easy-to-maintain code. To sum it up, it will save you a significant amount of time and money while ensuring your system remains functional and easy to use.

Benefits of Microservices for Online Gaming

Alongside the usage of Golang, the microservices architecture is ideal for the implementation of online gaming platforms. That’s mainly because, with it, your system can be separated into several different processes running for each functional component of your project: that is, for instance, your payment service can work separately from your login service, and more. That’s extremely important because, in the event of an outage in a service, the others won’t go down as well. Additionally, if there’s a usage spike in your service, it can be horizontally scaled very easily. This means that, if the need arises, you can create more instances of the same service, apply a load balancer, and withstand the spike with no problems whatsoever.

Furthermore, some other interesting points about the usage of microservices are how they can allow for independent deploys without compromising the whole structure, and how flexible they can be to develop new features. Both these features stem from the fact that every component works independently of the other. The deploys are enabled by the separation between repositories for each component; with it, you can, for instance, deploy a new feature on your login service, without compromising your payment service. That’s crucial when you need to do an emergency maintenance, fix a critical bug, adapt something for a specific client, etc.

Regarding the flexibility aspect, this occurs because different services are usually allocated to different repositories, services, virtual machines, etc. So, since the whole of the context is entirely set apart, you can evolve one service at a time, without compromising the other ones, and open the way to overcome your competition. And, with all of this, one can easily comprehend the importance of this architectural style for interactive gaming development, to the point where it is basically unavoidable; a good microservice implementation can be the turning point for the success or failure of a platform.

Combining Golang and Microservices for Scalable iGaming Solutions

Due to all of this, combining both Golang and the microservices architecture makes for a potent combo to develop solutions for iGaming platforms, being the best option for systems that need the best performance possible. With Go, you can have processing power for blazing-fast operations, to deal with huge chunks of data, and deal very easily with huge data throughput. Also, with microservices, your architecture will be very well subdivided into functional components, meaning that every service has its own environment and context, hence evolving separately from the other ones, allowing for quick hotfixes and a better development experience.

For instance, for an iGaming platform, you can have three basic different services: LoginService, PaymentService, and SportingOddsService, alongside your front-end, which also needs to be hosted. The LoginService won’t be used as frequently as the SportingOddsService, which will run calculations all the time, sometimes even from non-logged-in users. With this architecture, your most critical services can get more resources to run their processing tasks, while you can save money on the less critical ones by running them on less powerful virtual machines.

Lastly, nowadays, communications between these services are very efficient and can be done quickly by using gRPC or messaging services such as Kafka or RabbitMQ. With this, your services will effectively talk to each other in an organized way, implementing queues and processing lists.

Best Practices for Building iGaming Platforms with Golang Microservices

Although mixing microservices with Golang is a powerful combination, it is no silver bullet. You still have to do it right to achieve its maximum extent, and to do so, a few requisites must be attained. So, to help you, here is a quick list of best practices when building iGaming platforms:

Observability (logs, metrics, and tracing)

It is crucial to have well-structured observability for your services. Without it, you’re left in the dark, and it is completely impossible to understand what’s happening with your product. So, with tracing, you can receive alerts whenever a usage spike happens, so you may remain alert and prepared to deal with a higher-than-usual demand, and configure scaling, service multiplication, etc. Also, with logs, you can visually understand the processes your system goes through and what it is dealing with, which will help you debug, find points of attention, and see what needs to be improved in your code. And, lastly, tracing allows you to track what your users do in your application, how they use its features, their usage pipeline, and story tracking, etc. With it, you can improve your users’ experience, understand how they interact with the interface, and make your platform more pleasant to use.

Automated testing in each microservice

Automated tests are a guarantee that your system will always observe a minimum level of quality, being free of bugs and with at least an acceptable speed of usage. Though this step is usually overlooked and ignored, as the lack of testing doesn’t immediately break your service, and tests are quite difficult to develop, they’re a sign of maturity and carefulness for a product. They will automatically test new features and see if they have bugs, and if they do, those features won’t reach the production environment. 

Usage of containers (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)

This point is almost unavoidable in modern software development. Every single system must be containerized, whether you use Docker, AWS Fargate, Portainer, or any other tool. It is absolutely important to containerize applications because it guarantees with 100% certainty that it will run in whatever environment you try to run it. Containers are controlled environments that run only the requested dependencies in pre-determined versions and distributions, and if a system runs in your local containerized environment, then it will run anywhere. Also, when your system grows big and you have many different containers, then it is a good idea to orchestrate it with Kubernetes, which is a tool that lets you configure and manage them all simultaneously and automatically. You can learn more about it in this article.

Caching strategy for high performance

Lastly, you must cache responses for repeated identical API calls to gain speed and make your user experience more fluid and quick. It will save you money on your usual database, use fewer resources, and allow your SGBD to work only on different transactions, saving time. Implementing a caching layer on the system is an absolute win/win situation, as they’re usually cheaper and provide for way quicker response times, letting you use smaller machines for your regular database, so there are no downsides in using it.

Starting a simple microservice with Golang

Here’s a quick step-by-step on how to create a microservice with Go. To do so, we will use the most popular Golang framework for web service creation, which is called Gin. It is essential to use the most popular and most up-to-date framework available, as that’s usually the most secure, performant, and maintainable option on the market. And, currently, for Golang, Gin is the best option. So, without further ado, let’s understand the steps on how to create a new service:

Pre-requisites: There are very few requirements to start a new project, but they are still essential:

• Go (recommended Go ≥ 1.23 for compatibility).
• An integrated developer environment (IDE) such as VS Code or GoLand, and git.

Start the module and install Gin: You must run the following commands in your terminal. It will install Gin in your local directory and start a new project.

mkdir user-svc && cd user-svc
go mod init github.com/yourorg/user-svc
go get github.com/gin-gonic/gin

Recommended project structure: This is a simple folder structure, ideal for simpler projects and capable of solving most of the basics:

user-svc/
├─ cmd/
│  └─ main.go          # application entry point
├─ internal/
│  └─ api/
│     └─ routes.go     # definition of routes
├─ go.mod

The main file: Your main file is located at cmd/main.go, which is the entry point to your service and where it is set up:

package main
import (
   "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
   "user-svc/internal/api"
)

func main() {
   // Creates a server instance
   r := gin.Default()

   // Register routes
   api.RegisterRoutes(r)

   // Run server at port 8080
   r.Run(":8080")
}

The routes file: Here, you can set up your different routes and determine how they behave and work:

package api


import (
   "net/http"
   "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
)

func RegisterRoutes(r *gin.Engine) {
   // Simple "Hello World" route
   r.GET("/hello", func(c *gin.Context) {
       c.JSON(http.StatusOK, gin.H{
           "message": "Hello, World!",
       })
   })

   // Example route with a parameter
   r.GET("/hello/:name", func(c *gin.Context) {
       name := c.Param("name")
       c.JSON(http.StatusOK, gin.H{
           "message": "Hello, " + name,
       })
   })
}

How to run the server: Finally, we can run the project and test the API routes. We must take a few steps to run it:

Start the module:

go mod init user-svc
go get github.com/gin-gonic/gin

Run the service:

go run cmd/main.go

Test in the navigator or with curl:

curl http://localhost:8080/hello
curl http://localhost:8080/hello/Chudovo

Keep evolving your project: Now, it’s up to you to keep evolving your project and turn it into a real service, with database connection, tests, containerization with Docker, and whatever your use case might require.

Future Trends in iGaming Technology with Golang

The future of iGaming platforms made with Golang is bright and can already be foreseen. First of all, the usage of artificial intelligence is going to be a huge differential in the short to medium term, as it can heavily personalize user experience, suggest the best bets, understand how the user behaves, etc. Also, it can help the administrator predict future market movements, explore new ideas, and estimate future odds, among many other utilities.

Furthermore, the expansion into the metaverse and augmented reality environments is also very promising for the interactive gaming environment. Suppose the idea is to interact with the user. There is no better way to achieve this than to use AR and literally place the environment of your gaming platform around the user, integrating it into their daily experience and making them feel as close to it as possible. 

And, lastly, Golang is quickly growing in the market, most of all in those niches where performance is a very strict requirement. Because of this, and as AI and AR tools only get more and more popular and demand more and more processing power with fewer response times, this language is surely going to become even more popular in the future. This means that Golang will always be very much up-to-date, and it will be rather easy to find developers to maintain and keep evolving your applications, hence guaranteeing the future of your platform.

Conclusion

To sum everything up, iGaming platforms have very specific requirements that not every development stack can accomplish with the critical quality standard. That’s because of the high traffic it can receive, most notably during moments of spikes in important events. Both performance and security are crucial for the best user experience; otherwise, users will migrate to other platforms. Also, transactions must be trustworthy: think, for instance, about how much dissatisfaction would come from a financial transaction that is wrongfully marked as complete when it is not. The customer can lose money due to this, deriving solely from a system glitch, and that would be absolutely critical, leading to the loss of reputation, customers, and even having legal consequences.

Having that in mind, microservices constructed by Golang developers are amongst the best architectural choices for developing iGaming platforms. That’s because of how secure and performant the language is, and how versatile and useful this development paradigm is. With it, your future maintenance and product development will be much easier; you can save costs on less critical services and allocate more resources to critical ones; and even, during spikes, horizontally scale the needed services.