Gaming with AWS

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Vladimír Šimek, Sr. Solutions Architect @ AWS
Gaming with AWS

Agenda
• Stories of AWS customers:
• Zynga Journey (Back) to AWS
• Epic Games – Battle Royale on AWS
• Why AWS for Gaming?
• How?
• Q & A

Zynga’s Journey (Back) to AWS
by Dorion Carroll, CIO, Zynga
re:Invent 2015

Zynga’s Journey (Back) to AWS
Zynga Inc. is an American social game developer
running social video game services founded in April
2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, California,
United States. The company primarily focuses on
mobile gaming, offering the games on mobile devices,
including smartphones and tablets on Apple's iOS and
Google's Android operating systems, and on social
networking platforms such as Facebook
Their most known games include titles like Farmville,
Mafia Wars, Vampire Wars and Zynga Poker.

Zynga games and data centers
Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, and the X-Wars games
were hosted in retail data centers in Silicon Valley.
We did just about everything:
• Equipment purchasing
• Racking and stacking
• Networking
• Operations and maintenance

Rapid growth with finite capacity
• We outgrew our data centers
• Lead times on equipment created a constant state of stress
• Bigger games actually cannibalized equipment from lower
performing games

FarmVille and the AWS cloud to the rescue
• FarmVille launched in AWS in June 2009 as our first Amazon EC2 game
• A few months later, it crossed the 80 million monthly active user mark
• In the summer of 2009, it would not have been possible for us to acquire
enough hardware for this meteoric growth, let alone provision it or even fit it in
our data center footprint

Zynga and AWS from 2009–2011
• Zynga continued to launch and scale
massive games on Facebook running
on top of AWS:
• Café World, CityVille, FrontierVille,
ChefVille, Bubble Safari, and more
• These games each rocketed from 0 to 10 million
users in weeks
• Zynga became extremely good at scaling in the cloud
• Our games like Zynga Poker, Words With Friends, and
even Mafia Wars launched on mobile platforms

zCloud: a cloud of our own
• Our appetite for EC2 instances and storage grew
• In partnership with AWS, we worked hard to keep up
• It wasn’t enough – we were consuming 10s of thousands of instances
and needed more
• With games like FarmVille and CityVille at scale and with more on the
way, we created our own cloud with plans of operating in a hybrid model

zCloud worked
• For major work loads, our new equipment
and dual network configuration gave us
nearly 3x gains in efficiency
• Our analytics infrastructure was able to
scale to new heights
• We were able to run both virtual instances
and bare metal as needed
• Time passed, equipment aged, and
mobile was upon us

Changing times
• Over the past few years, our industry and our games have moved to
mobile
• Our tech teams have created scalable, multi-tenant game services that
require a lot less equipment
• AWS invests heavily in scale, performance, configuration options, and
managed services
• We are investing in creating great games and can leverage the scale of
AWS and their learnings since 2011

Analytics breaks new ground in AWS
• Zynga stores and analyzes petabytes of data
• The equipment in our first zCloud data center was aging
• We chose to exit that data center and attempt to run our infrastructure in
the cloud
• No one had done this at our scale before
• We conducted 3 PoCs with AWS
• A fourth try that AWS conducted finally showed the way
• In 12 months, AWS has advanced storage and compute three times
• Had we chosen our own infrastructure, we would be behind already

Games and game services
• On a case-by-case basis, we consider workloads, future growth, and expense
• In some cases, we have completely re-implemented systems behind an API using
AWS managed services, while others have been lift and shift migrations
• The flexibility in options (instance classes, managed services, storage, etc.) has
given us the ability to experiment with live workloads running in parallel to choose
the best option

With Friends paves the way
• Words With Friends is our largest game – mobile and web
• It runs on iOS, Android, Windows, Kindle, and Facebook
• It is powered by a multi-tenant, turn-based backend
• The same backend powers Hanging With Friends, Word
Streak, Matching With Friends, Gems With Friends,
Chess With Friends, and What’s the Phrase
• We took a conservative, lift and shift approach to move
the backend

With Friends paves the way
• The move went smoothly with zero player downtime
• Post-migration, we were able to reduce the overall size by
over 30%
• Updated to AWS Linux image
• Upgraded Memcache to newer version
• Took advantage of I2 and local SSD
• These updates have shown the path for how to treat
many of our other games and services post-migration

Some key victories
• For With Friends, we re-implemented our Community Matchmaking:
• Reduced 100 database servers to 3 in AWS
• Updating to AWS Linux allowed us to drop our application server
instances from ~300 to ~200 due to the enhanced networking
capabilities
• Zynga Poker replaced a large MySQL farm with Amazon DynamoDB
dramatically reducing operational overhead
• A separate Zynga Poker database cluster saw 30 – 40X improvement in
query performance even under full write load:
• Query 1 went from 38 seconds to 1 second
• Query 2 went from 26.7 seconds to 1.5 seconds

Three reasons to consider a public cloud
• Business focus
• Zynga can focus on technical innovation in our games
• Investment
• With AWS, we pay for what we use, nothing more
• A three-year CapEx commitment means you are committed to what you
buy now vs. what is state of the art in one, two, and three years
• People
• Less emphasis for people to have hardware and physical infrastructure
expertise
• We can focus our people on running and operating our applications

“There’s a lot of places that are not strategic for us to have
scale and we think not appropriate, like running our own
data centers. We’re going to let Amazon do that.”
Mark Pincus, CEO, Zynga

Epic Games – Battle Royale (all-in) on
AWS
by Chris Dyl, Director of Platform, Epic Games
AWS Summit 2018, New York

About Epic Games

Fortnite Statistics

All-In on AWS

Platform Architecture

Analytics Statistics

Analytics Architecture

Future

Why AWS for Gaming?

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. AWS GAMING
TAKE YOUR STUDIO TO THE CLOUD
• Cloud adoption is growing World-Wide
• AWS is a leader in this space
• The comprehensive suite of AWS products and
services can help cut costs and speed games to
market for game developers
• You only pay for what you use, when you use it
• It doesn’t matter where you are in the game
development lifecycle, from initial design, to post-
launch analytics, AWS has something to offer

GET RID OF TIME CONSUMING & EXPENSIVE TASKS
After migrating to AWS, Miniclip now experiences availability in the five 9s (99.999 percent).
Latency was reduced from 4.5 seconds to 2 seconds. Time to market decreased by 97
percent. Infrastructure costs were reduced by 69 percent, and the manpower required to run
the infrastructure was reduced by 66 percent. After migrating to AWS, Miniclip’s operating
expenses decreased by 60 percent. Because Miniclip no longer needed to spend money on
new hardware, CAPEX fell 75 percent.
Go Global In Minutes
Stop Guessing at
Capacity Planning
Move from risk-laden
up-front expense to
flexible variable expense
Remove complicated
Infrastructure Management
that adds little business value

AND FOCUS ON YOUR CORE MISSION
“When Supercell launched,” says Sami Yliharju, services lead at Supercell, “the
founders wanted to create a company where the focus would be on the best people
making the best games.” Using AWS helps Supercell keep its focus on what it does
best: developing games that keep its players happy.
Lower Time Spent
on Infrastructure
Concentrate on new
business initiatives
Dedicate more resources
to innovation

Your
Datacenter
Amazon Web
Services
Fully Featured
Compute
Resource &
Deployment
Management
Common Controls
for Security &
Access
Integrated
Networking
Data Integration
& Life Cycle
Management
Flexible hybrid options
DEPLOY HOWEVER YOU LIKE
AWS GAMING

PARTNERSHIPS, NOT CONTRACTS
AWS GAMING
Old World
Proprietary
Very expensive
Punitive licensing inhibits change
Limited flexibility
New World
Open-source
Cloud economics
Come and go as you please
Build on top of existing standards
“Aurora has been nothing short of impressive. While our workload is fairly modest – the busiest
instance is an r3.2xl handling ~9k selects/second during peak for a 150 GB data set – we love that so
far Aurora has delivered the necessary performance without any of the operational overhead of running
MySQL.” Chris Broglie Architect (Zynga)

ENTERPRISE
APPS
DEVELOPMENT & OPERATIONSMOBILE SERVICESAPP SERVICESANALYTICS
Data
Warehousing
Hadoop/
Spark
Streaming Data
Collection
Machine
Learning
Elastic
Search
Virtual
Desktops
Sharing &
Collaboration
Corporate
Email
Backup
Queuing &
Notifications
Workflow
Search
Email
Transcoding
One-click App
Deployment
Identity
Sync
Single Integrated
Console
Push
Notifications
DevOps Resource
Management
Application Lifecycle
Management
Containers
Triggers
Resource
Templates
TECHNICAL &
BUSINESS
SUPPORT
Account
Management
Support
Professional
Services
Training &
Certification
Security
& Pricing
Reports
Partner
Ecosystem
Solutions
Architects
MARKETPLACE
Business
Apps
Business
Intelligence
Databases
DevOps
Tools
NetworkingSecurity Storage
Regions
Availability
Zones
Points of
Presence
INFRASTRUCTURE
CORE SERVICES
Compute
VMs, Auto-scaling,
& Load Balancing
Storage
Object, Blocks,
Archival, Import/Export
Databases
Relational, NoSQL,
Caching, Migration
Networking
VPC, DX, DNS
CDN
Access
Control
Identity
Management
Key
Management
& Storage
Monitoring
& Logs
Assessment
and reporting
Resource &
Usage Auditing
SECURITY & COMPLIANCE
Configuration
Compliance
Web application
firewall
HYBRID
ARCHITECTURE
Data
Backups
Integrated
App
Deployments
Direct
Connect
Identity
Federation
Integrated
Resource
Management
Integrated
Networking
API
Gateway
IoT
Rules
Engine
Device
Shadows
Device
SDKs
Registry
Device
Gateway
Streaming Data
Analysis
Business
Intelligence
Mobile
Analytics

Traditional: Rigid AWS: Elastic
Servers
Demand
Capacity
Excess Capacity
Wasted $$
Demand
Unmet Demand
Upset Players
Missed Revenue :(
SCALE TO WHAT YOU NEED – PAY FOR WHAT YOU USE
AWS GAMING

Planning Dev/Test Retention & Monetize
Next
Launch
Before Launch Launch After Launch
Users
Try & Error
CBT
(Closed Beta)
Performance
Test
Marketing
(Free to Play)
Daily Reward
In-app
Purchase
Appstore
Featuring
Push Notification
Store Design
Next Season
Launch
Time
Acquisition
MATCHES PRETTY CLOSE TO A GAME LAUNCH CYCLE
AWS GAMING

GAMING IS GLOBAL – SO ARE WE
AWS GAMING

AWS Global Infrastructure
Regions
• Geographic locations
• Consist of at least two Availability Zones
Availability Zones
• Clusters of data centers
• Isolated from failures in other Availability Zones

Example AWS Region
AZ
AZ
AZ AZ AZ
Transit
Transit
• 1 of 19 AWS world-wide AWS regions
• Redundant paths to transit centers
• Transit centers connect to:
– Private links to other AWS regions
– Private links to AWS Direct Connect
customers
– Internet through peering & paid transit
• Metro-area DWDM links between AZs
• AZs <2ms apart & usually <1ms

COMMON GAME BACKEND CONCEPTS
AWS GAMING
• Think in terms of APIs
• HTTP + JSON
• Get friends, leaderboard
• Binary asset data
• Multiplayer servers
• High availability
• Scalability
https://aws.amazon.com/ko/solutions/case-studies/devsist

ELB
• Choose region
• >=2 Availability Zones
• Amazon EC2 for app
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon RDS database
• Multi-AZ
Region
EC2 EC2
AWS GAMING
CORE (HA) GAME BACKEND

ELB
Region
EC2 EC2
AWS GAMING
SCALE IT OUT
• Amazon S3 for game data
• Assets
• UGC
• Analytics

AWS GAMING
AMAZON S3
Secure, durable, highly-scalable object storage.
Store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web
“With AWS, we have tremendous flexibility, and we never get into
a situation where there is something we can’t do.”
“The flexibility of the AWS Cloud allows us to do things
that we otherwise couldn’t do,”

ELB
Region
EC2 EC2
CloudFront
CDN
AWS GAMING
SCALE IT OUT
• Assets
• UGC
• Analytics
• …Add a CDN - Cloudfront

AWS GAMING
AMAZON CLOUDFRONT
Global CDN that accelerates delivery of your DLC,
Update Patches,APIs, video content or other files.
Sega didn't provide us a quote, but they do use CloudFront
and they would have said some very nice things in this
quote. You have to trust us on this!
“By combining the power of AWS compute & storage with the
Amazon CloudFront content delivery network, we can provide an
excellent user experience to everybody playing our games &
watching our video content—regardless of their geographical
location,”

EC2 EC2
ELB
Region
EC2 EC2
CloudFront
CDN
AWS GAMING
SCALE IT WAY OUT
• Assets
• UGC
• Analytics
• ... with CloudFront!
• Auto Scaling Group
• Capacity on demand
• Respond to users
• Automatic healing

ELB
Region
EC2 EC2
CloudFront
CDN
AWS GAMING
SCALE IT WAY OUT
• Assets
• UGC
• Analytics
• ... with CloudFront!
• Auto Scaling Group
• Capacity on demand
• Respond to users
• Automatic healing
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Memcached & Redis

ELB
Region
EC2 EC2
CloudFront
CDN
• Games are write heavy
• Caching of limited use
• Key value key value
• Binary structures
• Database = bottleneck
WRITING IS PAINFUL
AWS GAMING

AWS GAMING
SHARDING IS NOT FUN

AMAZON DYNAMODB
AWS GAMING
Fully managed NoSQL database
with single digit latency at any scale
“Using Amazon DynamoDB frees us from building,
maintaining, & sharding large real-
time data intensive projects.”
By using AWS, Frontier Games can scale compute resources
easily to handle large spikes in user traffic with popular titles, and
is saving up to 30 percent compared to using a traditional
technology infrastructure,

• Fully-managed
• NoSQL data store
• Provisioned throughput
• Secondary indexes
• PUT/GET keys
• Document Support!
• 400 KB Items
• Reindexing (Soon!)
ELB
Region
EC2 EC2
CloudFront
CDN
AWS GAMING
AMAZON DYNAMODB

OR DITCH SERVERS ALTOGETHER - LAMBDA
AWS GAMING
Continuous
scaling
No servers to
manage
Never pay for
idle – no cold
servers (only
happy
accountants)

Run code without servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume.
Triggered by events or called from APIs:
• PUT to an Amazon S3 bucket
• Updates to Amazon DynamoDB table
• Call to an Amazon API Gateway endpoint
• Mobile app back-end call
• And many more…
Makes it easy to:
• Perform real-time data processing
• Build scalable back-end services
• Glue and choreograph systems
AWS LAMBDA – SERVERLESS COMPUTING
AWS GAMING

Bring your own code
Node.js, Java, Python, C#, Go
Bring your own libraries (even
native ones)
Simple resource model
• Select power rating from 128
MB to 3 GB
• CPU and network allocated
proportionately
• Reports actual usage
Programming model
• AWS SDK built in (Python
and Node.js)
• Lambda is the “webserver”
• Use processes, threads,
/tmp, sockets normally
Stateless
• Persist data using Amazon
DynamoDB, S3, or Amazon
ElastiCache
• No affinity to infrastructure
(can’t “log in to the box”)
LAMBDA PROGRAMMING MODEL
AWS GAMING

DON’T FORGET TO CAPITALIZE ON THESE TRENDS
① Big Data & Machine Learning for Player Retention & Monetization
② E-Sports
③ Cloud Connected Game Engines
AWS GAMING

• Managed Cluster for some of the most
popular Hadoop Frameworks.
• Hadoop, Spark, Presto and many more.
• Integrated with AWS via EMRFS –
connectors for S3, Kinesis, Redshift and
DynamoDB
• Built in support for resizable clusters incl.
Spot Market Pricing.
AMAZON EMR

• Massively parallel, petabyte scale
• Fully managed data warehouse
• $1000 per TB per year; 1/10th traditional
costs
• Use your existing integration and BI tools
AMAZON REDSHIFT

AMAZON ATHENA
Amazon Athena is an interactive query
service that makes it easy to analyze data
directly from Amazon S3 using Standard
SQL

Amazon QuickSight is a fast, easy to use Business Analytics service at
1/10th the cost of traditional BI solutions.
AMAZON QUICKSIGHT

Batch
• What game modes do
people like best?
• How many people have
downloaded DLC pack 2?
• Where do most people
die on map 4?
• How many daily players
are there on average?
Real-Time
• What game modes are
people playing now?
• Are more or less people
downloading DLC today?
• Are people dying in the
same places? Different?
• How many people are
playing today? Variance?
CHOOSE BETWEEN REALTIME & BATCH

REAL TIME – ACT ON INFORMATION AS IT HAPPENS
Capture, store, and analyze streaming data
Build custom applications that
process or analyze streaming data
such as real-time content
recommendations.
Quickly load TBs per hour of
streaming data into the cloud for
applications such as game logs
analysis or player sentiment on social
media.

THE RISE OF E-SPORTS
• In 2017, the global eSports market was valued at nearly 493 million U.S. dollars.
According to the estimates, global eSports market revenue will reach 1.65 billion
U.S. dollars in 2020. We saw many prominent gaming companies launch eSport
divisions to address the market
AWS GAMING

TWITCH - CREATE A FAN BASE!
AWS GAMING
15M daily active users
2.2-3.2M broadcasters / month
355B minutes watched / month
124M+ total clips
95 min per day on average
• Leading Social Video Platform for Gamers
• Helps to build strong communities for your
game
• Leverage entertaining players to spread
adoption
Is this game worth getting?
How do I get better at this game?

Broadcaster
AudienceGame
2
31
AWS GAMING
DESIGN FOR VIEWER INTERACTION

A free AAA game engine deeply integrated with
AWS and Twitch with full source
AWS GAMING

• Built based on the successful
CryEngine
• Systems by Double Helix
Games
• Cloud backend can be
powered by AWS
• Full integration with Twitch
• It’s free to use!
AWS GAMING

PC PlayStation 4,
Xbox One
Android,
iOS
Virtual
Reality
AMAZON LUMBERYARD SUPPORTED PLATFORMS
AWS GAMING

• IDE that allows live
Visual Editing
• Provides “Gems” for modular
development
• Designers for 2D & UI interfaces
• Entity & Component framework
• Visual scripting via Flow Graph
AMAZON LUMBERYARD EDITOR
AWS GAMING

Complex outdoor environments with lighting

High Definition Rendering in real-time for characterss

Meet “Rin” – Rendered real-time in Lumberyard

JOIN A GROWING LIST OF YOUR PEERS!
AWS GAMING

YES, WE NEEDED 2 SLIDES!
AWS GAMING

Starting point for Gaming on AWS:
h t t p s : / / a w s . a m a z o n . c o m / g a m i n g /

Resources:
Z y n g a s t o r y
h t t p s : / / w w w . y o u t u b e . c o m / w a t c h ? v = B Z f h h G v Y 3 c 0 & a b _ c h
a n n e l = A m a z o n W e b S e r v i c e s
R o v i o s t o r y h t t p s : / / w w w . y o u t u b e . c o m / w a t c h ? v = p m f I i -
a d X c M & a b _ c h a n n e l = A m a z o n W e b S e r v i c e s
E p i c G a m e s s t o r y
h t t p s : / / w w w . y o u t u b e . c o m / w a t c h ? v = H j Q y T H X O T e I & t = 6 s &
a b _ c h a n n e l = A m a z o n W e b S e r v i c e s

Questions ???
?

Thank you!
vladsim@amazon.com

Gaming with AWS

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