The gaming industry is undergoing massive changes, and AWS offers unique capabilities that game developers can use to succeed. In this session, we cover cloud gaming architectural patterns you can use to create highly available and scalable online games. We discuss games-as-APIs, database design considerations, decoupled architectures, and the best instance types for mobile, social, and AAA online games. By the end of this session, you’ll understand the different architecture patterns for the major classes of online games, as well as understand which AWS technologies will help you meet the unique challenges of each one.

1. MBL201 Mobile Game Architectures
Nate Wiger, Principal Solutions Architect
November 13, 2013
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

2. What's In It For Me?
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Mobile Game Trends
Core Game Backend
Scaling Out
Push Messages
Analytics

3. A Few Gaming Customers

4. Mobile Game Landscape
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Free To Play
In-App Purchases
Long-Tail
Cross-Platform
Go Global
User Retention = Revenue

5. Projected Mobile App Revenue
90000
80000
70000
60000
50000
40000
30000
20000
10000
0
Ads
IAP
Paid
Source:
Gartner
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017

6. Mobile Online Features
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Social Login
Friends
Leaderboards
Push Messages
Content Updates
Analytics

7. Pay As You Scale
Unmet Demand
Upset Players
Missed Revenue
Servers
Capacity
Demand
Demand
Excess Capacity
Wasted $$
Traditional: Rigid
AWS: Elastic

8. Pay As You Scale

9. Go Global In Minutes
9 Regions
25 Availability Zones
Continuous Expansion

11. Mobile Backend Technology
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HTTP Based
External Social API's
Save State
Database
Static Data Store
Mobile Push
Analytics

12. Get It Up
• Choose Region
• 9 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
ELB
Social API's
Region
Region

13. 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

15. Big picture slide

16. Scale It Way Out
ELB
S3
Region

17. Scale It Way Out
• Auto Scaling Group
• Capacity on Demand
• Respond to Users
ELB
EC2
EC2
S3
Region

18. Scale It Way Out
• Auto Scaling Group
• Capacity on Demand
• Respond to Users
• ElastiCache
• Memcache
• Redis
• Or DIY
ELB
EC2
EC2
S3
Region

19. 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
CloudFront
CDN
ELB
EC2
EC2
S3
Region

20. North America
Ashburn, VA (2)
Dallas, TX (2)
Hayward, CA
Jacksonville, FL
Los Angeles, CA (2)
Miami, FL
Newark, NJ
New York, NY (3)
Palo Alto, CA
Seattle, WA
San Jose, CA
South Bend, IN
St. Louis, MO
Europe
Amsterdam (2)
Dublin
Frankfurt (2)
London (2)
Madrid
Milan
Paris (2)
Stockholm
South America
Sao Paulo
40+ CloudFront POPs
Asia
Chennai
Hong Kong (2)
Mumbai
Osaka
Singapore (2)
Seoul
Sydney
Tokyo (2)

21. Big picture slide

22. Big picture slide

23. Elastic Beanstalk
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Managed Container
Git Push or Zip Upload
ELB, EC2, RDS
Web Dashboard
URL Swap Deploys
Same Performance
So Yeah, Use It

24. Hill Of Beans
• Beanstalk Manages
• ELB
• EC2
• Auto Scaling
• Monitoring
• RDS
• Add Other Services
• S3
• CloudFront
• ElastiCache
• SNS
CloudFront
CDN
ELB
EC2
EC2
S3
Elastic Beanstalk Container

27. Writing Is Painful
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Games are Write Heavy
Caching of Limited Use
Key Value Key Value
Binary Data
Database = Bottleneck
CloudFront
CDN
ELB
EC2
EC2
S3
Availability
Zone A
Availability
Zone B
Region
Region

28. DynamoDB
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NoSQL Data Store
Fully-Managed
Highly Available
PUT/GET Keys
Provisioned Throughput
Secondary Indexes
CloudFront
CDN
ELB
EC2
EC2
S3
Availability
Zone A
Availability
Zone B
Region
Region

30. Messages and Queues
• Simple Notification Service
• HTTP
• SMS
• Mobile Push
ELB
EC2
EC2
S3
Region

31. PUB
Messages and Queues
• Simple Notification Service
• HTTP
• SMS
• Mobile Push
• CloudWatch
• Monitoring
• Alerts
ELB
EC2
EC2
EC2
Region

32. Messages and Queues
• Simple Notification Service
• HTTP
• SMS
• Mobile Push
• CloudWatch
• Monitoring
• Alerts
• SQS
• Background Tasks
• Avatar Resizing
• Score Processing
ELB
EC2
EC2
EC2
Region

33. Messages and Queues
• Simple Notification Service
• HTTP
• SMS
• Mobile Push
• CloudWatch
• Monitoring
• Alerts
• SQS
• Background Tasks
• Avatar Resizing
• Score Processing
ELB
EC2
EC2
EC2
Region

34. PUB
Messages and Queues
• Simple Notification Service
• HTTP
• SMS
• Mobile Push
• CloudWatch
• Monitoring
• Alerts
• SQS
• Background Tasks
• Avatar Resizing
• Score Processing
ELB
EC2
EC2
EC2
Region

35. Big picture slide

36. ANALYTICS!

37. Off The Shelf Analytics
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Easy To Integrate
Pre-Baked Reports
Rate Limits
Retention Windows
Data Lock-In

38. Analytics on AWS
• Elastic MapReduce
• Managed Hadoop
• Parse Logs
• Data Cleanup
• Aggregation
CloudFront
CDN
ELB
EC2
EC2
S3
Availability
Zone A
Availability
Zone B
Region
Region

39. Analytics on AWS
• Elastic MapReduce
• Managed Hadoop
• Parse Logs
• Data Cleanup
• Aggregation
CloudFront
CDN
ELB
EC2
• Redshift
• Data Warehouse
• Column-Oriented
• SQL Compatible
EC2
S3
Availability
Zone A
Availability
Zone B
Region
Region

40. Redshift for Game Analytics
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Write File on Device
Periodically Upload to S3
Nightly Process into Redshift
Point GUI Tool to Redshift
2013-10-24,107,2.53,2134,932
2013-10-29,107,2.73,2211,817
2013-11-02,107,1.95,1833,752
2013-11-04,107,1.44,1121,635
2013-11-05,107,1.76,1411,1032

41. Redshift for Game Analytics
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Also Collect Server Logs
Periodically Upload to S3
Optional Cleanup with EMR
Stick Into Redshift
2013-10-24,107,2.53,2134,932
2013-10-29,107,2.73,2211,817
2013-11-02,107,1.95,1833,752
2013-11-04,107,1.44,1121,635
2013-11-05,107,1.76,1411,1032
EC2

42. Wrap It Up Already
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Free To Play is Here To Stay
Start Small, Scale Out
Elastic Beanstalk
DynamoDB
S3 with CloudFront
SNS Mobile Push
SQS + ElastiCache to Scale
Focus on the Game

43. A Few Gaming Sessions
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MBL303 – High-Performance Gaming Ops
MBL304 – Red 5's Firefall MMO
MBL305 – Killzone: Shadow Fall
MBL307 – Parse on AWS
MBL308 – SNS Mobile Push

44. Other Relevant Sessions
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DAT101 – Production DynamoDB in an Hour
DAT204 – SmugMug: MySQL to DynamoDB
DAT307 – ElastiCache Deep Dive
DMG204 – Elastic Beanstalk 0-60
SVC206 – Using SQS to Scale
DAT103 – Intro to Redshift
BDT203 – Analytics with DynamoDB + EMR

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