At re:Invent 2014, AWS' game development team presented a day of sessions designed to help game developers learn more about Amazon Web Services, industry best practices and be better prepared to make highly engaging, cloud-based games. Below is the content from the Game Development team presented at re:Invent 2014; we hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed making them for you.
Scalable Game Architectures That Don't Break the Bank
Martin Elwin, Solutions Architecture Manager, Amazon Web Services
Roope Kangas, Lead Server Developer, Grand Cru
In this session, AWS shares best practices for mobile, console, and MMO games that can scale from 1,000 to 1,000,000 users. See how to create a game backend using Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Learn about database scaling challenges, and how to use Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon ElastiCache to address them. And, hear how to deliver game assets efficiently using Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. Then, hear from Roope Kangas, Lead Server Developer and co-founder at Grand Cru, about their journey launching and cost-optimizing Supernauts on AWS. Grand Cru used load testing to validate their system before launch, enabling them to reach 1 million users in 6 days. Then, after launch, the team optimized their architecture based on system metrics to cut their AWS costs by more than half.
Real-World Hurdles with Millions of Players in The Simpsons: Tapped Out
Chris Callinaro, Electronic Arts
Colin Shirley, Electronic Arts
How do you really architect a game that can handle 5, 6, or 7 million daily active users? Learn about the scalability challenges that EA had to overcome for The Simpsons: Tapped Out. Hear how EA had to redesign their MySQL-based database layer on the fly, migrating over to Amazon DynamoDB, while keeping the game running. See how EA added AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Auto Scaling to simplify their deployments, while also lowering costs by enabling them to respond to changing player counts. EA shows how they switched from sticky sessions to Amazon ElastiCache, solving player disconnects and allowing further scaling out. Finally, EA shares some interesting statistics about The Simpsons: Tapped Out, as well as their overall learnings about how best to develop, deploy, and monitor a game on AWS.
Real-Time Game Analytics with Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB
Suhas Kulkarni, VP Engineering, GREE International
Kandarp Shah, Engineering Manager, GREE International
Success in free-to-play gaming requires knowing what your players love most. The faster you can respond to players' behavior, the better your chances of success. Learn how mobile game company GREE, with over 150 million users worldwide, built a real-time analytics pipeline for their games using Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB. They walk through their analytics architecture, the choices they made, the challenges they overcame, and the benefits they gained. Also hear how GREE migrated to the new system while keeping their games running and collecting metrics.
How Riot Games re:Invented Their AWS Model
Jonathan McCaffrey, Software Architect, Riot Games
Marty Chong, Senior Network Engineer, Riot Games
Riot Games is a high-paced dynamic environment with many groups striving to release new content, features, and tools. Riot runs League of Legends, one of the biggest online multiplayer games, and uses AWS to host many complex sites that service millions of players everyday. In this session, Riot Games talks about the evolution of their management practice on AWS over the past two years, some lessons learned the hard way, and where they hope to be in the future.
Beyond Game Servers: Load Testing, Rendering, and Cloud Gaming
Dhruv Thukral, Gaming Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
Yuval Noimark, VP of Research & Development, Playcast Media Systems
In this session, we go beyond online game servers, to explore other areas where AWS can benefit your game. First, we dive into using AWS to perform load testing of your game. We present architecture patterns, what makes a good load test, and real-world example scenarios. We then highlight emerging trends with cloud rendering, and show how you can integrate Amazon EC2 GPU-based instances into your game workflow. Finally, hear from Playcast, who brought their Cloud Gaming service to new players worldwide, by leveraging the G2 EC2 instance. Playcast share how they architected their streaming service to best leverage the cloud, things they learned, and demo their service streaming games from AWS.
Gaming DevOps Scopely's Continuous Development Pipeline
Mitch Garnaat, Scopley
How do you deploy a game with millions of online users, playing across the globe, without interrupting their experience? Learn how Scopely uses AWS automation tools to build, deploy, and manage highly-scalable mobile games. They show how to use AWS CloudFormation and Ansible to build golden AMIs. See how they do green/blue deployment of those AMIs using Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, to avoid kicking players offline. Then, hear how they leverage Amazon Kinesis, ElasticSearch, and Amazon SNS to create a unified monitoring and alerting infrastructure for your games. Finally, learn how Scopely use Amazon VPC and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to keep your scalable gaming infrastructure safe and secure.
Deploying a Low-Latency Multiplayer Globally: Loadout
Nate Wiger, Principal Gaming Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
James Gwertzman, CEO, PlayFab
This is a deep-dive straight into the guts of running a low-latency multiplayer game, such as a first-person shooter, on a global scale. We dive into architectures that enable you to split apart your back-end APIs from your game servers, and Auto Scale them independently. See how to run game servers in multiple AWS regions such as China and Frankfurt, and integrate them with your central game stack. We'll even demo this in action, using AWS CloudFormation and Chef to deploy Unreal Engine game servers. In the second half, hear from PlayFab, who built the backend for the Top-10 free-to-play PC shooter Loadout. PlayFab reveals details about their architecture, including AWS Elastic Beanstalk setup, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon RDS patterns, data sharding, and use of multiple Availability Zones. Finally, PlayFab highlights challenges they faced when deploying to AWS China, and how they solved them.
Game Delivery with Amazon AppStream
Nic Branker, AppStream and Gaming Solution Architect, Amazon Web Services
What if you could deliver a console-quality gaming experience to mobile devices anywhere in the world? In this session, learn about Amazon AppStream and how it enables real-time app streaming as a service via a few SDK calls. Hear how CCP has designed a new initial experience for their massive multiplayer game, EVE Online, that streams their character creator from the cloud, while the game downloads in the background, increasing conversions. We look at how Amazon Game Studios is developing hybrid games that run half on the tablet, half in the cloud, enabling console-quality graphics on mobile devices.
