1. Windows Azure Platform
Partner Solution Case Study
Game Developer Reduces Costs and Achieves
On-Demand Scalability with Cloud Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Media and entertainment
Partner Profile
Sneaky Games is an Austin, Texas–based
independent software vendor that
creates online games for both social
media, including Facebook, and mobile
platforms. The company has 22
employees.
Business Situation
The company used a hosted
infrastructure from Rackspace and
evaluated Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud, but struggled to efficiently
manage and scale the infrastructure
environments from either provider.
Solution
Sneaky Games designed a scalable
infrastructure and uses the Windows
Azure platform to deliver its games on
mobile and social media platforms.
Benefits
Achieved business-critical scalability
Reduced costs for personnel and
infrastructure
Simplified IT maintenance
“We can have new load-balanced instances up and running
in Windows Azure in less than 10 minutes. That is
significant for any company that develops for the social
media space.”
Mark Bourland, Chief Technology Officer, Sneaky Games
Sneaky Games is an independent software vendor that develops
role-playing games for social media platforms, such as
Facebook, and mobile devices. The small company, which
employs 22 people, used a hosted infrastructure at Rackspace to
deliver its games to customers, but struggled with costly and
time-consuming server maintenance, particularly when the
company had to scale up its infrastructure to meet peaks in
traffic. Sneaky Games turned to the Windows Azure platform,
hosting its games on the cloud service in Microsoft data centers.
As a result, the company achieved levels of scalability critical to
its success in the social media space and can scale up or scale
down its infrastructure in minutes. Sneaky Games avoided the
need to hire more IT personnel to maintain its infrastructure and
can instead dedicate its resources to developing compelling
games and quickly offering them to players.
2. Situation
Sneaky Games is an independent software
vendor that incorporated as a new
company in 2009 after six years of creating
successful web-based games for the web
consultancy Net-Recon. The games it
developed for Net-Recon consisted
primarily of online games that supported
marketing initiatives for companies, such as
Logitech. Now, the Austin, Texas–based
Sneaky Games develops games for social
media platforms—primarily Facebook—and
mobile platforms. The company supports
2.7 million registered game players and has
22 employees.
Prior to incorporating, Sneaky Games used
hosting providers, such as Rackspace, for its
server infrastructure so that it could avoid
the capital expenses associated with
managing its own data center. Although
these infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
options helped reign in hardware expenses,
the company was still saddled with costs
associated with managing and maintaining
the hosted infrastructure. “We still had to
manage virtual machines manually, which
included provisioning servers, installing and
updating operating systems, and
configuring our game-server technology,”
says David Godwin, Chief Executive Officer
at Sneaky Games. “It was a hassle and
costly from an IT management
perspective.”
As the company grew and attracted more
customers, the company’s leadership
realized that it would have to invest in
additional personnel to manage the hosted
infrastructure at Rackspace. Its
infrastructure needed to grow at the same
pace as its fan base and also needed to
keep up with the company’s rapid game
development cycle. “There was a
disconnect between what the developers
could do and what the IT and network
teams could support, which is not
uncommon in a lot of software
development organizations,” says Godwin.
“That said, if we’re going to spend the
money to hire more employees, we’d much
rather hire developers to build the games
that increase our revenue than hire
additional employees to manage an
infrastructure.”
Not only was Sneaky Games concerned
about the time, effort, and money required
to maintain its infrastructure, but it was also
worried about its ability to scale up the
infrastructure rapidly. “With our hosted
infrastructure, we still had to worry about
provisioning machines, configuring them,
and managing load-balancing efforts to get
the right size infrastructure and high
performance that is required for online
gaming,” explains Mark Bourland, Chief
Technology Officer at Sneaky Games. “This
could take hours—or in some cases days—
to scale up, and then still required time-
consuming maintenance on an ongoing
basis.”
Before making its venture into the social
media gaming arena, the ability to scale up
rapidly was less of a concern because the
number of expected players was easier to
predict and the company could design its
infrastructure to handle an expected
volume of traffic. “We switched from
creating web-based games for very
targeted audiences, which had tens of
thousands of users, to developing social
media games, which have the potential to
attract millions of users at the same time—
that was scary for us,” says Godwin. “If one
of our games really takes off, the ability to
scale up rapidly is very important to our
success as a company.”
Although Sneaky Games was pleased that it
could avoid the hardware costs associated
with an IaaS model, the company hoped to
“With Windows Azure, we
were able to react
accordingly and scale up
our infrastructure to handle
the doubled load. That
reaction time just wouldn’t
be possible with any other
computing model.”
David Godwin, Chief Executive Officer,
Sneaky Games
3. find a solution that would alleviate the
headache and cost associated with
maintaining its infrastructure. It also
wanted a solution that would enable it to
quickly scale the infrastructure to support
the unexpected—and potentially viral—
growth that often accompanies games on
social media platforms. “What we really
wanted was a platform as a service,” says
Bourland. “We needed that additional
abstraction layer on top of the
infrastructure that would really let us put
our computing and storage resources to
good use.”
Solution
In January 2009, after Sneaky Games split
off from Net-Recon, the company
evaluated Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2) and the Windows Azure platform.
After a short evaluation period, the game
developer chose Windows Azure because it
offered the platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
model that the company sought. “We set
up a few servers on Amazon EC2, but it was
the same situation as with Rackspace—
we’d have to manage and maintain the
infrastructure ourselves,” explains Godwin.
“Windows Azure was so much easier to use
that it was a simple decision to go with the
PaaS offering from Microsoft.”
Designed a Scalable Architecture
In April 2010, Sneaky Games launched its
first game on Windows Azure just four
months after adopting the technology.
Fantasy Kingdoms is a social game geared
primarily toward females, where game
players can create mythical kingdoms, cast
spells, enchant their lands, and conjure
magical crops.
To start, two developers at Sneaky Games
worked to migrate the code base for the
company’s proprietary gaming engines to
Windows Azure. They relied on their
existing developer skills and knowledge of
the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5,
Microsoft ADO.NET, and the Microsoft
Visual Studio 2010 Professional
development system and finished the
project in fewer than three weeks. To build
a scalable architecture that would take the
best advantage of the Windows Azure
platform, the developers reengineered
some of the code for its game engine. For
instance, it previously relied on relational
data on the back end but instead used Blob
Storage in Windows Azure to store game
and game-player data. “We can quickly add
Blob Storage containers when we need to
grow,” explains Godwin. “Coupled with the
compute processing available in Windows
Azure, the storage capabilities make for a
powerful combination when we’re looking
to rapidly scale up.”
Sneaky Games hosts its gaming engine in
web roles in Windows Azure, which serves
as the Microsoft cloud services
development, hosting, and management
environment and is hosted in Microsoft
Figure 1 – Sneaky Games uses several
components of Windows Azure for
its highly scalable architecture.
4. data centers (see Figure 1). It also uses
worker roles in Windows Azure and the
Queue service for back-end processing
tasks. When the gaming company first
adopted Windows Azure when the
technology was still in its beta release,
Sneaky Games also used worker roles to
host a web caching service that helped
boost performance and reliability of its
gaming engine. Then, in 2011, the company
started using Windows Azure Caching,
which is a distributed application cache
service for Windows Azure. With Windows
Azure Caching, Sneaky Games can easily
increase the size of its cache, depending on
how many game players it has. For
instance, when the company prepares to
release a new game, it can increase the size
of its cache to accommodate heavier-than-
normal game traffic in just a few clicks.
Although Sneaky Games no longer uses a
relational data structure for game and
player data, and instead uses blobs to store
that information, the company uses
Microsoft SQL Azure to store metadata and
logging information that is captured during
game play. SQL Azure is a cloud-based,
self-managed, relational database service
built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies.
Uses a Pay-As-You-Go Model for
Infrastructure and Revenue
After Sneaky Games launched Fantasy
Kingdoms in April 2010, the company spent
the next year developing additional games
and finding a revenue strategy that
complemented its infrastructure costs.
Sneaky Games takes advantage of the pay-
as-you-go-model that Windows Azure
offers, ensuring that it only pays for the
services that it uses. This gives the
company an affordable, right-size
infrastructure—an infrastructure that is
neither under-utilized nor over-taxed. At
the same time, the pay-as-you-go model
helps the company predict revenue growth
with more accuracy because its
infrastructure costs are directly
proportionate to its revenue.
“We offer our games for free, but we also
offer faster game play and the ability to use
special features to players who are willing
to pay,” explains Godwin. “Those players
who pay for their game play make up a
relatively consistent percent of our total
users, so we can predict that for any
number of total users, our revenue will
scale with it. With the pay-as-you-go model
from Windows Azure, we can predict how
much our infrastructure costs will be for
that same number of users. In all, it helps
us forecast our revenue and business
growth over the long term.”
In August 2011, the company launched
Vampire Legacy, a role-playing game for
Facebook where players can recruit friends
to help them in their adventure, learn
powerful spells, create weapons, and battle
other vampire hunters (see Figure 2). By
October 2011, before even marketing or
advertising for Vampire Legacy, the game
had attracted almost 30,000 registered
users. Sneaky Games also prepared to
launch another game for Facebook in
addition to its first mobile game for
smartphones.
Benefits
By using the Windows Azure platform,
Sneaky Games achieved the critical levels of
scalability that enable it to meet the high-
volume traffic demands that can occur with
any social media game. In addition to
scaling up its infrastructure, the company
can just as easily scale down its computing
and storage resources, effectively creating a
dynamic infrastructure that is the right size
for its needs at any time. With its dynamic
infrastructure, Sneaky Games has simplified
“By using the Windows
Azure platform, we do not
have to hire additional
personnel to maintain our
infrastructure, no matter
how much it grows. Our
existing IT staff can easily
keep up with our
development cycle.”
Mark Bourland, Chief Technology Officer,
Sneaky Games
5. IT maintenance, avoided the need to hire
additional personnel, and, at the same time,
can focus on developing more games that
customers look forward to.
Achieved Business-Critical Scalability
Sneaky Games knows that, with the viral
nature of social media, any of its games on
Facebook might attract millions of users
with little notice. With a hosted
infrastructure at Rackspace, the company
could not quickly scale to meet those
potential compute and storage needs. With
Windows Azure, however, the company has
an elastic infrastructure that can easily
expand to accommodate millions of users if
needed. “Windows Azure gives us the
ability to scale to nearly unlimited
proportions for compute and storage,”
explains Bourland. “We can have new load-
balanced instances up and running in
Windows Azure in less than 10 minutes.
That is significant for any company that
develops for the social media space.”
In one example, the number of registered
users playing Fantasy Kingdoms doubled in
size in less than 24 hours. “With Windows
Azure, we were able to react accordingly
and scale up our infrastructure to handle
the doubled load,” says Godwin. “That
reaction time just wouldn’t be possible with
any other computing model.”
Reduced Personnel and Infrastructure
Costs
Whereas previously, Sneaky Games was
faced with the need to hire additional IT
personnel to manage its hosted
infrastructure, the company avoids those
costs by using the Windows Azure
platform. “By using the Windows Azure
platform, we do not have to hire additional
personnel to maintain our infrastructure, no
matter how much it grows,” says Bourland.
“Our existing IT staff can easily keep up
with our development cycle.”
In addition, Sneaky Games can scale down
its infrastructure as demand dictates and
avoid paying for infrastructure that it no
longer needs. For instance, as games age
and fewer participants play them, Sneaky
Games does not need an expansive
infrastructure. “It is rare for a social media
game to live in perpetuity,” explains
Godwin. “Players sometimes find other
games to occupy their time or we make the
deliberate decision to spend less marketing
budget on a particular game as we prepare
to release something new—either way, the
number of registered or concurrent players
declines and we don’t need as much
Figure 2 – In August 2011, Sneaky
Games released Vampire Legacy—a
role-playing game for Facebook.
7. For instance, after Fantasy Kingdoms
reached the height of its popularity and
before Sneaky Games started releasing
additional games, the company realized
that it did not need as many compute and
storage resources to keep the game
running. “We decided that we only needed
about one-half of the infrastructure that we
were using for Fantasy Kingdoms,” explains
Godwin. “In less than 30 minutes, we
eliminated half of the Windows Azure
instances we were using and cut our
infrastructure costs by 50 percent.”
Simplified IT Maintenance for Speedy
Go-to-Market Time
Not only does Sneaky Games avoid the
need to hire additional IT personnel to
manage the infrastructure, the company
also frees up employees’ time to focus on
introducing compelling games to its
customers more quickly. Personnel no
longer have to worry about provisioning
and configuring servers with each game
launch. “In our previous environment with
Rackspace, we would have to set up a new
server, configure it, install our gaming
engine, and tune the infrastructure before
we could begin using it,” explains Bourland.
“With Windows Azure, it is simply a matter
of changing a number in a configuration
file and we’re up and running. We can
dedicate more time to what the customer
wants—new games and new features—
instead of dedicating that time to
managing infrastructure.”
Windows Azure Platform
The Windows Azure platform provides
developers the functionality to build
applications that span from consumer to
enterprise scenarios. They key components
of the Windows Azure platform are:
Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the
development, service hosting, and
service management environment for
the Windows Azure platform. It
provides developers with on-demand
compute, storage, bandwidth, content
delivery, middleware, and marketplace
capabilities to build, host, and scale
web applications through Microsoft
data centers.
Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL
Azure is a self-managed, multitenant
relational cloud database service built
on Microsoft SQL Server technologies.
It provides built-in high availability,
fault tolerance, and scale-out database
capabilities, as well as cloud-based
data synchronization and reporting, to
build custom enterprise and web
applications and extend the reach of
data assets.
To learn more, visit:
www.windowsazure.com
www.sqlazure.com
Software and Services
Windows Azure Platform
− Windows Azure
− Windows Azure Caching
− Microsoft SQL Azure
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published November 2011
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For more information about Sneaky
Games products and services, email
sales@sneakygames.com or visit the
website at:
www.sneakygames.com
