This document discusses how 5th Planet Games, a game development company, has used CloudStack and Amazon EC2 to manage their growing infrastructure needs as their employee count and game offerings expanded over time. It describes how they initially used a few EC2 servers and an RDS database, and now utilize 25 EC2 servers, 10 database servers, and CloudStack to manage resources across multiple zones. The document outlines benefits of CloudStack like automation, cost savings, and ability to tie resources across regions together. It shares how the company uses CloudStack and lessons learned in building out their private cloud.

1. U S I N G C L O U D S TA C K A N D A M A Z O N E C 2
R U N N I N G YO U R FA S T PA C E D D E V E LO P M E N T
ENVIRONMENT

2. WHO AM I?
 Brian Bullard– Systems
Engineer/Systems Architect/Unix
Admin
5th Planet Games

3. A STO RY T H AT I S N OT P O S S I B L E W I T H O U T
T H E C LO U D
 Founded in 2010.
 We build story driven, content
rich games for social and
mobile platforms.
 First Game released on
Facebook May 2010

4. I N T H E B EG I N N I N G … . .
Employees
 1 system admin/architect
 Game designer/CEO
 Game developer/CEO
 Office =
May 2010 “Dawn of the dragons”
 2 EC2 AWS servers
 1 RDS AWS MYSQL server

5. 2 ½ Y EA RS L AT E R . . .
Present day Games Resources
 Dawn of the dragons  25 EC2 servers
 Clash of the dragons  1 CDN endpoint
 Legacy of a thousand suns  10 Database servers
 3 Physical servers
 Legacy of heroes
Office:
 40 Employees
Platforms
 Armor Games
 Kongregate
 Facebook
 Kabam

6. G ROW T H I S S U ES
 Scattered resource and some ticking time bombs as far as
physical hosts are concerned.
 In a dynamic development environment access from
home and on the road is problematic in emergency
situations.
 manual provisioning

7. W H Y W E N E E D A P R I VAT E C LO U D
 User controlled firewall.
 Automation.
 Private/public resources segregation.
 Cost savings.
 Local/shared storage on demand.
 Backups.
 Ability to tie east and west coast resources together.
 Scalable architecture
 HA
 Broad hypervisor support

8. C LO U D STAC K S E T U P
Cloudbridge
Zone-West Zone-East
1 Management server 1 Management server
3 host servers (32 GB 3 host servers – KVM
RAM 8 Core) – KVM 1 shared secondary
1 shared secondary and primary storage
and primary storage (5 (In progress)
TB RAID10)
Amazon RDS
RDS
MSQL database
Amazon

9. H OW I H AV E B E E N U S I N G C LO U D STAC K
 Cloudbridge allows us to have one unified API layer for automation between AWS and the
private cloud. CS 4.0 will have this option built in.
 Owncloud to provide a shared storage along with private user based storage along with
Dropbox functionality and much more.
 Ulteo VDI to control user level access to resources along with a cheap desktop solution.
 Using Puppet for node creation and server configuration types to deploy live and test
deployments to private and public cloud resources.
 Using projects to control and allow self service for development leads.
 P2V physical time bombs.
 Great backup solution for data using incremental snapshotting.
 Ability to scale and add our east coast region as a zone for .

10. N E X T ST E P S
 Build SAAS models to deploy our applications.
 Build automation around monitoring.
 Empower the developers to use the powerful API.
 Since all my infrastructure is automated take a vacation.
 Multi cloud deployments using my awesome unified API
server

11. L ES S O N S L EA R N E D
 Watch the management/agent/hypervisor logs to troubleshoot issues.
 Learn the role that the systemVM, SSVM and Virtual router play and how they communicate.
 Hang out in the #cloudstack irc channel and join the Cloudstack incubator list.
 Check out cloud podcasts, and follow companies on twitter to keep up on current events.
 Decide what works best for your environment and plan for the future growth.
 Devcloud is an awesome resource. http://wiki.cloudstack.org/display/COMM/DevCloud
 Attend BACD and related webinars.
 Building a cloud is not easy nor should it be.

12. CO N TAC T I N FO +
Brian Bullard
brian@5thplanetgames.com
Twitter: @bullardo
Bullardo MIRC #cloudstack
.