So can you count entertainment as a basic human need? If, yes then eventually video games would grow from a small group of people’s toys (core gamers) to lives staple need for everyone, old and young, men and women. For it’s the cheapest, and easiest to access a form of entertainment.
With the fact that 65% of the US households play video games, I think it is vital to understand its technical risks also, especially those companies that are featuring online games.
The collective problem faced by some of these companies includes- lacking the manpower to keep up with necessary tasks, such as scaling the infrastructure, managing backups, provisioning, setting up new servers, providing high availability to apps, and disaster recovery. Moreover, enduring peak usage periods, multiple players, and high volumes of write operations are becoming monotonous problems for operations teams.
Sample Architecture
Bit by bit organizations looked for robust, flexible and scalable server infrastructure.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided them with a reference solution architecture involving components like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to host static files such as images, sounds, flash applications, or Java applet.
- Amazon CloudFront to provide substantial improvements in latency, fault tolerance, cost, fast network data transfer rates and a simple publishing/caching workflow.
- Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute the requests from the game application to a group of web server running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
- Amazon Auto Scaling to automatically adjust the size of the group of web servers depending on rules like network load, CPU usage.
- Amazon DynamoDB persists player data which provides tables to run analytics on player behavior and usage patterns.
- Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) to process large amounts of data easily.
- Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to send emails to players in a cost effective manner.
Subsequently, companies like NEOWIZ, PEAK GAMES, INDIA GAMES, 3DDUO, SILVER STYLE STUDIOS, SEGA, and many more were ensured flexibility in deployment and scaling. Automatic capacity adjustment, highly available and high-speed database, and data processing cluster were also featured by the AWS architecture.
Thereafter, a recent case study indicated that in last 12 months, Silver Style Studios has achieved 99 per cent availability, eliminated new hardware expenses and lowered operational costs with the consumption-based pricing that AWS offers. Using AWS, organizations can now focus on developing products and applications instead of managing an IT infrastructure.
To top it all, I would just ask that Are you one of those online gaming companies that overcame these difficulties in gist by AWS Guidance?
