This document summarizes TabTale's mobile game architecture which was designed to handle high scale. The architecture provides server-side services and an SDK for TabTale's apps. It ensures zero downtime for clients by using AWS for infrastructure and storing static content on S3. It was designed for large scale from the start by using horizontal scaling, multiple tiers of content delivery including a CDN, and effective caching. The architecture takes a microservices approach using services that are stateless, decoupled, and communicate via JSON. Node.js was used for its performance and ease of development. MongoDB was used to store document data.

1. TabTale story: Building a
publishing and monitoring
mobile games
architecture with high
scale
FullStack Developers Israel
20.5.2014
Google Campus TLV
Hosted by:

2. Assaf Gannon

3. The project’s goal:
Provide a set of server
side services and SDK
for the company’s apps

4. Mobile Device
Client App
SDK
Server
First Sketch

7. TabTale is a very successful startup that develops
interactive books, games, and educational apps
• Released Over 250 apps for children on both iOS and
Android devices
• Over 350 million downloads
• Over 25M active monthly users
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8. The Tricky Stuff
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9. Zero downtime
Clients must never be affected from server failures or
downtime
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11. Zero Downtime - Solutiontext
Solid Infrastructure - AWS
● Elastic Beanstalk - PaaS to run the services
● S3 - static content storage and delivery service
● MongoHQ - Managed MongoDB
● RedisLab - Managed Redis

12. Zero Downtime - Solution
• A good contingency:
○ Fallback to static content on S3
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13. Large Scale from Day 1text

14. Large Scale from Day 1
• Horizontal Scaling - Stateless servers
• Prevent heavy server loads
○ Setup multiple tiers of static content
delivery:
■ CDN (Cloud Front)
■ S3
■ Nginx / Apache
■ Pre-generated permutations on Redis / in
memory
• Use cache effectively
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15. Effective Cachetext

16. Effective Cache, cont.text

17. Rapidly Changing Requirements
• Avoid Monolithic Application
• Take the “Micro Services” approach from the
beginning
• Dynamic Model - loose types
• Separate Data Base per Service
• Services are entirely stateless
• Services are decoupled, and talk JSON
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19. Node js
Ideal for rapid development of IO intensive
applications
● Extremely easy and fast to setup, develop, and
deploy
● Very low learning curve
● Speaks JSON as mother tongue
● Great performance doin IO operations
● NPM
● Can be deployed to multiple PaaS providers
including Elastic Beanstalk
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20. Nodejs Internal Overviewtext

22. The Event Looptext

23. Spring Boot
The Java way to rapidly bootstrap applications
● Create stand-alone Spring applications
● Embed Tomcat or Jetty directly (no need to deploy WAR
files)
● Provide opinionated 'starter' POMs to simplify your
Maven configuration
● Automatically configure Spring whenever possible
● Provide production-ready features such as metrics,
health checks and externalized configuration
● Absolutely no code generation and no requirement for
XML configuration
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24. MongoDB
Great for managing document oriented data and
Meta Data
● No schema management
● Very fast reads
● Very simple and powerful DSL
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25. Tricky Stuff Checklist
• Zero downtime
• Large scales from day 1
• Vague and rapidly changing requirements
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26. THANK YOU
Assaf Gannon
Email: