Handling online game challenges by Gabriel Glachant, IT Manager at Bulkypix
- 1. Web Game Conference 2013 Gabriel Glachant - Bulkypix
- 2. Bulkypix in a few numbers A 40 person company A catalog of over a 100 games and mobile applications 15 million users International publisher Facebook and mobile platform developper Expert in mobile marketing, PR and social networks
- 3. Online Game Challenges Online platform requirements … and risks State of the art Business continuity Scalability Controlled costs Service disruption due to Server overload Datacenter failure Security issues Cheating Data theft All of those result in loss of revenue and reputation
- 4. Initial Investment Bulkypix requirements Traditional Server Platform Linux servers A turnkey MySQL DB Datacenter Hardware (servers, storage) Network (switches, routers, load balancers) Security (firewalls) Bandwidth Systems & networks administration ! High initial investment (time and money) !
- 5. Cloud Computing Linux servers: AWS EC2 (IaaS) Run pretty much any linux distro you want/need Snapshot servers anytime you want MySQL DB: AWS RDS (PaaS) Turnkey MySQL server (runs Oracle and MSSQL too) provision the CPU/storage that you need now increase CPU/storage later if necessary snapshots can be highly available (clusters !)
- 6. Hardware MySQL Database RDS MySQL Database Hardware Web Server EC2 Instance Web Server Client AWS EC2 EC2 Availability Zone AWS RDS
- 7. Business Continuity Bulkypix requirements Traditional Server Platform Server failover Load balancing What happens when a datacenter crashes ? Load balancers / failover Service Level Agreements Multiple Datacenters
- 8. High Availability AWS RDS – Multiple Availability Zones Standby Master Automatic Failover Transparent Snapshots (no service interruption) AWS EC2 – ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) Failover in case of server failure Load balancing !
- 9. RDS MySQL Database EC2 Instance Web Server Client AWS EC2 EC2 Availability Zone AWS RDS EC2 Availability Zone EC2 Instance Web Server RDS – Standby MySQL Database Client ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)
- 10. Featured on an App Store Bulkypix requirements Traditional Server Platform Horizontal Scalability Vertical Scalability Increase number of servers Increase server size
- 11. Scaling AWS EC2 – Resize an EC2 instance Stop instance, resize instance, start instance. AWS EC2 - Autoscaling Automatically scale up when server load increases User experience stays the same No server drop out from ELB because of load saturation No server failure cascade Automatically scale down when load decreases Scales costs down
- 12. RDS MySQL Database EC2 Instances Web Server AWS EC2 EC2 Availability Zone AWS RDS EC2 Availability Zone EC2 Instances Web Server RDS – Standby MySQL Database Client ELB (Elastic Load Balancer( EC2 Autoscaling
- 13. Conclusion We’ve only covered very basics offered by cloud computing. Cloud computing has given Bulkypix inexpensive access to the big toys. high availability. high scalability. Learnings Costs management => Reserve instances or commit bandwidth for better rates. => Use autoscaling. Can be challenging when designing the software stacks. => Test and iterate.