Whenever we think of open world games, we always think of games like assassin’s creed series, watch dogs 1 and 2 along with gta series. There are other several games which almost every gamer has played at least once in his life. this games are- Far cry 3,4, tom clancy’s video game series (in my case tom clancy’s the division) and many more. These are the games that are given to us by one of the leading publisher, distributor and creator of interactive entertainment UBISOFT.
Problems Ubisoft was dealing with
Now, we know that the games by the ubisoft are really awesome and the latency while playing this games is really low. here, latency is the time taken by client (gamers) to reach access the webserver of the ubisoft. During the launch of watch dogs 2, in the year 2016, the company was looking for a better platform for its well known multiplayer technology platform storm. with storm, ubisoft provide gamers with the massive world of the games like watch dogs 1,2 etc. before 2016, the company was facing various issues regarding peer to peer connections were not always possible or a lot of problems with the ip’s.
but the main problem they were facing was about the traffic. they wanted something to scale the large traffic which come during holidays almost every year. they used to do all the management of the traffic manually(management of the docker containers). Some of the parts of the company was already using aws for speed and efficiency.
Now, The company is looking for a platform which helps them to deal with their issues.
The Solution (AWS) and the services they used
The team then decided to use the AWS to try and solve their Use cases(problem) more efficiently. Ubisoft moved the development, staging and production environment of the storm to the AWS.
The company used the Auto Scaling feature to automatically provision compute resources. The EC2(Elastic cloud computing) instances running were 40 (with lots of ram and cpu). They also used orchestration features in Amazon ECS(EC2 Container Service) to manage the storm relay service. They also used Amazon Elasticache to set-up and manage distributed in-memory data stores.
ERIC Fortin (Technical Architect, Ubisoft) said “Using AWS, we can automatically scale to support large traffic spikes. Over the last Christmas holiday, we met traffic demands for Watch Dogs 2 by scaling up to 120 relay servers, routing 70 terabytes of data in 20 days.”
According to Fortin, by taking advantage of AWS, the agility and scalability they achieved, they would have never achieved it using on-premise IT Environment.
Another advantage Ubisoft acquired by using AWS is now they are capable of rolling out global updates in minutes because they now use Amazon EC2 instance for the task.
“We do rolling deployments in three regions in less than 30 minutes, because we use Amazon ECS for all our updates”, says Fortin.
The benefits are-
- Quickly scales to support demands of 80,000 players
- Deploys global game-service updates in less than 30 minutes
- Increases competitiveness through speed and agility
Source of the case Study — https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ubisoft/