This publish is co-written with Monica Cujerean and Ionut Hedesiu from Flutter UKI.
On this publish, we share how Flutter UKI transitioned from a monolithic Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)-based Airflow setup to a scalable and optimized Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) structure utilizing options like Kubernetes Pod Operator, steady integration and supply (CI/CD) integration, and efficiency optimization strategies.
About Flutter UKI
As a division of Flutter Leisure, Flutter UKI stands on the forefront of the sports activities betting and gaming trade. Flutter UKI presents a various portfolio of leisure choices, encompassing sports activities wagering, on line casino video games, bingo, and poker experiences. Flutter UKI’s digital presence is powerful, working by way of an array of famend on-line manufacturers. These embrace the enduring Paddy Energy, Sky Betting and Gaming, and Tombola. Whereas Flutter UKI has established a robust on-line foothold, it maintains a major bodily presence with a community of 576 Paddy Energy betting retailers strategically positioned throughout the UK and Eire.
The Knowledge workforce at Flutter UKI is integral to the corporate’s mission of utilizing information to drive enterprise success and innovation. Specializing in information, their groups are devoted to making sure the seamless integration, administration, and accessibility of knowledge throughout a number of sides of the group. By creating strong information pipelines and sustaining excessive information high quality requirements, Flutter UKI empowers stakeholders with dependable insights, optimizes operational efficiencies, and enhances the person expertise. Its dedication to information excellence underpins its efforts to stay on the forefront of the net gaming and leisure trade, delivering worth and strategic benefit to the enterprise.
The journey from self managing Airflow on Amazon EC2 to working Airflow workloads at scale utilizing Amazon MWAA
Flutter UKI’s information orchestration story started in 2017 with a modest Apache Airflow deployment on EC2 situations. As the corporate’s digital footprint expanded, so did their information pipeline necessities, resulting in an more and more complicated monolithic cluster that demanded fixed consideration and useful resource scaling. The operational overhead of managing these EC2 situations turned a major problem for his or her engineering groups. In 2022, Flutter UKI reached a crossroads. They wanted to decide on between re-architecting their service on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) or embracing Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA).
Flutter UKI was trying to rework their information orchestration service from a resource-intensive, self-managed system to a extra environment friendly, managed service that will enable them to concentrate on their core enterprise aims reasonably than infrastructure administration. By intensive proof-of-concept (POC) testing and shut collaboration with AWS Enterprise Help, Flutter UKI gained confidence within the skill of Amazon MWAA to deal with their refined workloads at scale. Their alternative of MWAA over a self-managed resolution on Amazon EKS mirrored Flutter UKI’s strategic concentrate on utilizing managed companies to scale back operational complexity and speed up innovation.
The migration to Amazon MWAA adopted a methodical method. There was intensive testing of a number of POCs. In the course of the POCs, the engineering workforce discovered MWAA to have ease of use, which helped them scale back the educational curve leading to sooner. Studying from every POC, they iterated on the ultimate structure by making data-driven choices. Beginning with a small subset of directed acyclic graphs (DAG), the Flutter UKI workforce expanded their deployment over time, progressively shifting a whole lot and ultimately 1000’s of workflows to the managed service. This cautious, phased transition allowed them to validate the efficiency and reliability of MWAA whereas minimizing operational danger.
Excessive-level structure design
In the course of the service re-architecture, the info workforce strategically managed over 3,500 dynamically generated DAGs by implementing a classy distribution method throughout a number of Amazon MWAA environments to create a workload remoted atmosphere. Another excuse for having a number of environments was to make it possible for nobody MWAA atmosphere doesn’t get overloaded by a number of DAGs. By putting DAG information throughout various Amazon Easy Storage Service (Amazon S3) areas and configuring distinctive DAG_FOLDER paths for every atmosphere, the info workforce created an clever load balancing mechanism that allocates workflows primarily based on complicated standards together with atmosphere sort, process quantity, and environment-specific DAG affinity. A round-robin distribution technique was designed to attenuate single atmosphere load, making certain scalable infrastructure with zero efficiency degradation. This method allowed the workforce to optimize workflow orchestration, sustaining excessive efficiency whereas effectively managing an intensive assortment of dynamically generated DAGs throughout a number of MWAA environments. To supply extra compute to particular person duties and to maintain the MWAA environment friendly, Flutter UKI delegated the DAG execution to an exterior compute atmosphere utilizing Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The ensuing high-level structure is proven within the following determine.
Kubernetes Pod Operator (KPO) for duties: Flutter UKI transitioned from utilizing customized operators and lots of native Airflow operators to solely using the Kubernetes Pod Operator (KPO). This determination simplified their structure by eliminating pointless complexity, lowering upkeep overhead, and mitigating potential bugs. Moreover, this method enabled them to allocate compute assets on a per-task foundation, optimizing total service efficiency. It additionally enabled the usage of totally different container photographs for various duties, thereby avoiding library dependency conflicts.
Kubernetes Pod Operator wrapper (KPOw): As a substitute of utilizing KPO immediately, they developed a wrapper (KPOw) round it. This wrapper abstracts the underlying complexity and minimizes the affect of signature adjustments in Airflow, Amazon MWAA, Amazon EKS, or operator variations. By centralizing these adjustments, they solely have to replace the wrapper reasonably than 1000’s of particular person DAGs. The wrapper additionally simplifies DAGs by hiding repetitive parameters, reminiscent of node affinity, pod assets, and EKS cluster configurations. Moreover, it enforces company-specific naming conventions and permits for parameter validation at process execution time reasonably than throughout DagBag refresh. In addition they launched profiles and picture information, the place profile information comprise essential KPO parameters, and the corresponding picture information hyperlink to the repository for the duty’s container picture. This setup ensures consistency throughout duties utilizing the identical profile and facilitates simultaneous updates throughout duties.
Month-to-month picture updates in Kubernetes: Imposing a coverage of month-to-month picture updates made positive that their code remained present, stopping safety vulnerabilities and avoiding intensive code adjustments as a result of deprecated libraries.
Steady Airflow updates: Flutter UKI maintains a cutting-edge infrastructure by implementing new Airflow variations shortly after launch, whereas following a rigorously orchestrated deployment technique. Their method makes use of customary Amazon MWAA configurations and employs a scientific testing protocol. New variations are first deployed to growth and take a look at environments for thorough validation earlier than reaching manufacturing methods. This methodical development considerably reduces the chance of disruptions to business-critical workflows.
To realize operational excellence, Flutter UKI has applied a complete monitoring framework centered on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. Their monitoring resolution consists of strategically configured alarms that present early warning indicators for potential points. This proactive monitoring method allows their groups to shortly determine and examine anomalies in manufacturing workload executions, making certain excessive availability and efficiency of their information pipelines. The mixture of cautious model administration and strong monitoring exemplifies Flutter UKI’s dedication to operational excellence of their cloud infrastructure.
CI/CD integration: By managing their code in GitLab, with obligatory code critiques and utilizing Argo Occasions and Argo Workflows for picture updates in AWS ECR, they streamlined their growth processes.
Efficiency Optimization: A good portion of the DAGs are dynamically generated primarily based on database metadata. This technology course of runs exterior Amazon MWAA, with its personal CI/CD pipeline, and the ensuing DAG information are saved within the S3 DAG. Inserting code exterior of duties was averted, together with parameter analysis. Parameters and secrets and techniques are saved in AWS Secrets and techniques Supervisor and retrieved at process runtime. Engineers intention to attenuate or eradicate inter-service dependencies inside MWAA.
DAGs are scheduled to distribute execution instances as evenly as potential. Activity code and customary modules are hosted on Amazon S3 and retrieved at runtime. For bigger codebases, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) volumes are mounted to process pods are used.
Outcomes
At present, Flutter UKI’s infrastructure contains 4 Amazon MWAA clusters, every executing duties on devoted Amazon EKS node teams. They handle roughly 5,500 DAGs encompassing over 30,000 duties, dealing with greater than 60,000 DAG runs day by day with a concurrency exceeding 450 duties working concurrently throughout clusters. They anticipate a ten% month-to-month enhance on this workload within the brief to medium time period. Throughout main occasions like Cheltenham and Grand Nationwide, the place information load will increase by 30%, their MWAA service has demonstrated stability and scalability, reaching a 100% success charge for vital processes in 2025, a major enchancment over earlier years.
Conclusion
Flutter UKI’s journey with AWS Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) has resulted in a steady, scalable, and resilient manufacturing atmosphere. The cautious re-architecting of Flutter UKI’s service, mixed with strategic choices round process execution and infrastructure administration, has not solely simplified their operations, but additionally enhanced efficiency and reliability. Safety and compliance advantages have been additionally seen, as a result of MWAA supplies managed safety updates, built-in encryption, and integration with AWS safety companies. Maybe most significantly, the shift to MWAA has allowed Flutter UKI’s engineering groups to redirect their efforts from infrastructure upkeep to business-critical duties, specializing in DAG growth and enhancing information pipeline effectivity, in the end accelerating innovation of their core enterprise operations.
If you happen to’re trying to scale back operational overhead and migrate to a totally managed Airflow resolution on AWS, think about using Amazon MWAA. Get in contact along with your Technical Account Supervisor or your Options Architect to debate an answer particular to your use-case. You may as well attain out to AWS Help by making a case should you’re going through an points organising the service.
Able to see what Amazon MWAA is like? Go to the AWS Administration Console for Amazon MWAA. For extra data, see What Is Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow. Moreover, Utilizing Amazon MWAA with Amazon EKS reveals you learn how to combine Amazon MWAA with Amazon EKS.
Concerning the authors
Monica Cujerean is a Principal Knowledge Engineer at Flutter UKI, specializing in service associated initiatives that cowl efficiency optimization, price effectiveness, and new function adoption on most AWS service in our stack: Amazon MWAA, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon SageMaker.
Ionut Hedesiu is a Senior Knowledge Architect at Flutter UKI, accountable for designing strategic options to cowl complicated and various enterprise wants. His important experience is on Amazon MWAA, Kubernetes, Amazon Sagemaker, and ETL options.
Nidhi Agrawal is a Technical Account Supervisor at AWS and works with massive enterprise clients to offer the technical steerage, finest practices, and strategic assist to clients, serving to them optimize their environments within the AWS Cloud.
John Kellett is a Senior Buyer Options Supervisor with 25 years of expertise throughout personal and public sectors. John helps drive end-to-end buyer engagement by way of program administration excellence. By understanding and representing clients’ strategic visions, John aligns to develop the folks, organizational readiness, and know-how competencies to satisfy the specified outcomes.
Sidhanth Muralidhar is a Principal Technical Account Supervisor at AWS. He works with massive enterprise clients who run their workloads on AWS. He’s enthusiastic about working with clients and serving to them architect workloads for price, reliability, efficiency, and operational excellence at scale of their cloud journey. He has a eager curiosity in information analytics as nicely.
