We try to keep the rules the same everywhere. Applications identify themselves with a key. Players get signed tokens
that we check against their live session on every call. Back- office users only see the brands and players they're allowed
to see. Module APIs aren't exposed to the internet at all. ROK INTIHAR VP Technology Comtrade Gaming
versioning and backwards compatibility while still allowing the technology to move forward?
We had to learn this lesson the hard way. We had a client with many different teams integrating to our system. One requested a quick change, another hadn't time to adapt. Te plan was to have one big bang release all together, so when the second team didn't finish we were under pressure from both teams. One to push the release, another to postpone. But this was a valuable lesson that helped us include versioning thinking everywhere. It was at the beginning, when we had one main customer view. Now we can handle multiple different customers on the same code.
In practice, our player API carries the version in the URL of every endpoint, and old and new versions run side by side. A change that would break existing clients goes into a new version, and the old one stays as it is until the client is ready to move. Adding fields or new endpoints happens in the current version, because that doesn't break anyone. Our own back-office front end is generated from the same API contracts, so we'd feel a breaking change before any operator did.
And, my opinion, we also skip the versioning hell, as we are pushing customers to the same version. And they accept that because they don't notice problems or have any extra work.
Does giving operators greater control over their technology choices create a new challenge around complexity? At what point does flexibility risk producing a fragmented stack that becomes harder to maintain and operate?
It can. In the early years, when we still built mostly around one main customer, customer-specific work slowly made every release heavier, and that's part of why we're strict about it today. Operator-specific behavior goes into defined extension points, such as customer layers in the gateway or installable AddOns, and never into a fork of the core.
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What I look at is whether an operator can take our next release without a project around it. Every component someone adds also needs monitoring and an owner.
What role do documentation, developer portals, sandbox environments and testing tools play in an API-first model? How important is the developer experience when operators or third parties are building directly against your platform?
Simulators are actually part of almost every project. It is better now, but when we started years ago, getting an integrator's test system was time consuming. We couldn't wait with implementation and testing, so we had to build them. Or I could say they saved a lot of our projects, if not most.
Beyond that, we publish OpenAPI contracts for our APIs, there's an integration guide for the player API, and the provider APIs come with Postman collections. When a client's portal team took over front-end development, we also gave them an AI agent that knows our API, so they could get answers without waiting for our engineers. Every operator has QA environments, and we load-test each release against that operator's traffic profile. Where we want to improve is self- service. Today a new partner still needs some contact with our team to get started, and we'd like them to be able to get a sandbox and make their first calls on their own.
As more functionality is exposed through APIs, how do you manage security, authentication, permissions and data access without creating friction for operators and their technology partners?
We try to keep the rules the same everywhere. Applications identify themselves with a key. Players get signed tokens that we check against their live session on every call. Back-office users only see the brands and players they're allowed to see. Module APIs aren't exposed to the internet at all.
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