How bet365 is Moving the Dial in Cloud Engineering

An introduction to Cloud Engineering at bet365

Innovation, inspiration and cloud engineering – we've got it all in this insightful post by our friends at bet365. Hear directly from Martin Goldstone - Cloud Platform Technical Lead as he tells us about bet365's brand-new Cloud Platform Team. We discuss technology, long-term goals and much more; we hope you enjoy the article!

Tell us a bit about your background and current role

I’ve been working within Infrastructure for the past 18 years, starting my career as a Linux-focussed Engineer. As my career progressed, I naturally picked up bits of coding and scripting as is often the case with Linux Engineers, then more recently started working with containerisation technology which led me to the public cloud. I joined bet365 almost 5 years ago as an Engineer, progressed to Senior, then Technical Lead within Infrastructure and now my role is Cloud Platform Technical Lead.

What is the Cloud Platform Team’s purpose?

This is a brand-new team within bet365 and we’ll be building out and establishing the company’s public cloud capability, enabling our developers to get their products into the cloud quicker and be faster to market with internal and external services. We’ll help our developers utilise new technology and enhance their capabilities in ways we’ve never seen before with a huge focus on security and performance.

bet365 is expanding rapidly around the globe and the cloud decreases the time it us takes to spin up new infrastructure drastically. We have a focus on containerised tech in the cloud, so we’re moving away from worries about patching and some of the common headaches associated with working on-prem, all of which enables us to operate at a much greater scale and dynamically increase capacity whenever we need.

All this can put us closer to our customers, faster.

Which cloud technology is the team working with?

We’ve been working with Google Cloud as our public cloud partner for IaaS and PaaS workloads. We’re focussed on using the right technology for the right use case, from big data analytics with BigQuery (we generate loads of data here!), through to hosting our own bespoke workloads in GKE, using Anthos Service Mesh to enable our developers to release quicker and get better insight when things do go wrong. For our own workloads, we’re making sure we use Google’s battle-hardened managed services wherever it makes sense, like Cloud SQL and memorystore, freeing us up to investigate new products and technologies. We use Infrastructure-as-code and config-as-data tools like terraform and KRM with Config Connector to make all of this possible.

It’s not just about operating exclusively within the Google Cloud environment though, a company like bet365 has a huge existing environment to integrate with. We want really strong relationships with our colleagues in other teams, so we’re working closely with them to deliver services to tie the environments together.

By working with our SRE team, we are boosting our observability capabilities by unifying our logging, monitoring and metrics with Splunk to hook up with all the logs and metrics from our on-prem workloads. With our Networks team we’re standing up our new interconnect, using next-gen Palo Alto cloud-hosted firewalls to make sure connectivity between our Cloud and on-prem environments is as secure and seamless as possibly. And we’re working closely with our InfoSec team, using tools like Security Command Center and bringing in mechanisms like Binary Authorization to stay on top of vulnerabilities and enable us to react to developing threats as quickly and effectively as possible.

What are the Cloud Platform Team’s overall short-term and long-term goals?

Our current target is to establish version 2 of our landing zone environment, utilising a GitOps methodology which incorporates our security & observability approach more holistically. We’ll then start to migrate existing workloads and seek out new use case opportunities.

Ultimately, I believe we are looking to build a really strong Cloud Platform capability; something to rival the other, really strong, teams we have in technology. It’s a very exciting time to join as we are right at the beginning of this journey.

How do you support your Engineers?

All our Engineers will be given access to Pluralsight, which has an extensive amount of Google Cloud training material for on-the-job learning. They are encouraged to follow the certification tracks.

You will be working alongside experienced architects who will support you with any technical challenges you may face.

We offer hybrid working in either Manchester or Stoke (a minimum of 2 days per week on-site, the rest can be remote) to all our Engineers. You can be office-based more often if this works better for you.

What sets this opportunity apart at bet365?

This really is a brand-new opportunity and not something we’ve ever done before! A great deal of technical exploration will be encouraged and we’ll be finding new ways to do things all the time. There’s nobody to say ‘we’ve always done it this way’; if you’ve got ideas then we want to hear them. I think the most special thing is the team truly has a start-up mentality but with the financial backing of a very large and successful company behind it.

What do you enjoy about working at bet365?

I feel we have a really great bunch of people working here and the work itself is very interesting. It is fast-paced but the environment is supportive and we certainly don’t have a culture of blame. We’re all here to improve our systems and collaborate with each other to make that happen. I have progressed my career so much during my time here, so can honestly say the opportunities for development and progression are huge!

Bet365 is actively recruiting for Cloud Platform Engineers across Manchester and Stoke, so if this sounds interesting to you then be sure to check out the full job specifications below. They'd love to hear from you!

bet365 | Cloud Platform Engineer (bet365careers.com) (Manchester)

bet365 | Cloud Platform Engineer (bet365careers.com) (Stoke-on-Trent)

Thanks for reading!

This blog is reshared with bet365's permission. The original can be viewed here.