Slides from my talk on Gaming in the Cloud at the Playhubs London event in October 2015

1. Ian Massingham
AWS Technology Evangelist
@IanMmmm
ianm@amazon.com

2. Gaming in the Cloud

3. AWS GAMING CUSTOMERS

4. 2 31 4
Mobile Long-TailFree to Play In-App Purchases
6 75 8
Cross-Platform User Retention =
Revenue
Global Reach New, Enlarged
Audience
TRENDS IN GAMING

5. FORECAST MOBILE APP REVENUE GROWTH ($M)
0
20,000
40,000
60,000
80,000
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Paid IAP Ads
Source: Gartner

6. ESSENTIAL ONLINE FEATURES
• Social Login
• Friends
• Leaderboards
• Push Messages
• Content Updates
• Analytics

7. ONE OTHER ESSENTIAL FEATURE: SCALING
Traditional: Rigid AWS: Elastic
Servers
Demand
Capacity
Excess Capacity
Wasted $$
Demand
Unmet Demand
Upset Players
Missed Revenue

9. USING AMAZON EC2 TO SIMULATE
2.4 MILLION PLAYERS

10. 11* regions
28 availability zones
51 edge locations
* 10 for this use-case
Global Infrastructure: Go Global in Minutes

12. BACKEND TECHNOLOGY
• HTTP Based
• External Social API's
• Save State
• Database
• Static Data Store
• Mobile Push
• Analytics

13. LAUNCH FAST
• Choose Region
• 10 Globally
• One Availability Zone
• Ok for Development
• No Redundancy
• EC2 Instance
• Linux or Windows
• App Server Code
• Elastic Load Balancer
• DNS Entry Point
• Database
• RDS or DIY
Region
ELB
Social API's

14. SCALE IT OUT
• Add Another AZ
• High Availability
• Load Balancing
• Secondary Database
• RDS Multi-AZ
• Or DIY
• S3 for Game Data
• Assets
• UGC
• Analytics
ELB
S3
Region

16. SCALE IT WAY OUT
ELB
S3
Region

17. ELB
S3
EC2EC2EC2
Region
SCALE IT WAY OUT
• Auto Scaling Group
• Capacity on Demand
• Respond to Users

18. SCALE IT WAY OUT
ELB
S3
Region
• Auto Scaling Group
• Capacity on Demand
• Respond to Users
• ElastiCache
• Memcache
• Redis
• Or DIY

19. ELB
S3
EC2EC2EC2
Region
SCALE IT WAY OUT
• Auto Scaling Group
• Capacity on Demand
• Respond to Users
• ElastiCache
• Memcache
• Redis
• Or DIY
• CloudFront CDN
• DLC, Assets
• PUT / POST
• Game Saves
• UGC

21. Region
Availability
Zone A
Availability
Zone B
S3
EC2
ELB
EC2
WRITING IS PAINFUL/EXPENSIVE (IN RESOURCE TERMS)
• Games are Write Heavy
• Caching of Limited Use
• Key Value Key Value
• Binary Data
• Database = Bottleneck

22. Region
Availability
Zone A
Availability
Zone B
S3
EC2 EC2
ELB
DYNAMODB
• NoSQL Data Store
• Fully-Managed
• Highly Available
• PUT/GET Keys
• Provisioned Throughput
• Secondary Indexes

23. OTHER TOPICS WE DIDN’T COVER
• Creating loosely coupled
architectures with
messages and queues
• Analytics with Elastic
MapReduce and Redshift
• Amazon AppStream
• AWS Mobile Services

26. https://youtu.be/EvJPyjmfdz0
From 0 to 60 Million Player Hours in 400B Star Systems
Evolve: Hunting Monsters in a Low Latency Multiplayer
Game on Amazon EC2
https://youtu.be/WOU0ZXA5NiY
https://youtu.be/mZ2vPih03Lk
Riot Games: Migrating Mountains of Big Data to AWS

27. Thank You
@IanMmmm
ianm@amazon.com