William Hill sees 'most successful Grand National' following AWS migration

Gambling company William Hill has become increasingly popular over recent years, experiencing what was described as “a year like no other” in 2020 when it saw double-digit growth in its online revenue. To cope with the spikes in traffic and to continue to provide customers with a secure user experience, William Hill migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We had great support from AWS Professional Services as we transformed our infrastructure,” said Ben Fairclough, lead architect of cloud and infrastructure at William Hill. “Our biggest challenge was dealing with 15–20 years of virtual machines, data centres, and hardware. There was a massive amount of toil there.”

William Hill made use of the AWS Professional Services while doing this and was able to redesign and manage its information technology infrastructure in less than eight months.

“Instead of refactoring every application at the same time and moving them to AWS, we could choose the strategy that was most effective for each,” added Fairclough. “We could migrate quickly using VMware Cloud on AWS or rebuild natively on AWS where appropriate.”

William Hill also now uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon CloudFront, and VMware Cloud on AWS. During the migration, the company also took advantage of the AWS Training and Certification team to help its engineers become more confident about working in the cloud: “We did over 120 labs and 200 learning sessions with the training team from AWS,” said Sarah Lucas, head of cloud and infrastructure services at William Hill.

Since the migration, over 80 per cent of William Hill’s apps now run on AWS and the company can manage traffic spikes from big events such as the Grand National horse race. “We can scale different services up and down as needed,” added Lucas.

Using the cloud, there is no need to invest in hardware for busy periods which is then wasted afterwards. As a result of the migration, the company said that it “saw its most successful, issue-free Grand National in 27 years and achieved considerable cost savings in comparison to previous years.”