How to Power the Back-End in all platforms

Philip Fitzsimons (fitz), Solutions Architect - Gaming

Our experience of Gaming and AWS

Building a back-end for all platforms

The core

Scaling it out

Autoscaling and caching

Analytics

Massive Scale

Deployment options

Connect with us

Some game companies

Common Backend Design Patterns

First Stop: Core Backend

Region

Availability

Zone A

ELB

• Choose Region • 9 Globally

• One Availability Zone • Ok for Development • No redundancy

• EC2 Instance • Linux, Windows • App server code

• Elastic Load Balancer • DNS for App

• MySQL Database • RDS or EC2 yourself

Next Stop: Scale It Out

ELB

Availability

Zone A Availability

Zone B

Region

S3

• Add Another AZ • Redundancy (HA) • Load Balancing

• Add Slave Database • RDS Multi-AZ • Or EC2 yourself

• S3 for Game Data • Patches • UGC

Next Stop: Auto Scale + Caching

CloudFront CDN

ELB

Availability

Zone A Availability

Zone B

Region

S3

• Auto Scaling Group • Capacity on Demand • Respond to Users • Recover from Failure

• Memcache • ElastiCache • Or EC2 yourself

• CloudFront CDN • 40 POPs Globally • Edge Cache • DLC, Game Assets

EC2 EC2

Next Stop: Analytics

CloudFront CDN

ELB

Availability

Zone A Availability

Zone B

Region

S3

• Elastic MapReduce • Managed Hadoop • Parse Logs • Parallel Aggregation

• Redshift • Data Warehouse • Column-Oriented • SQL Compatible

EC2 EC2

Region

Security Group

Event-Driven Servers

Elastic Load

Balancing

Security Group

NoSQL EC2 Instances

S3 buckets for

binary data

Server

PUT

Client

GET

CloudFront (optional)

Security Group

ElastiCache Cluster

Auto Scaling Group

HTTP/JSON ServersAuto Scaling Group

HTTP/JSON Servers

SQS for jobs

and alerts

Auto Scaling GroupJob Workers

Security Group

Event-Driven Servers

Writes

Reads

Start Job

Reads

Writes

Job Results

Read Replica Read Replica

Master DB DB Slave

Security Group

NoSQL EC2 Instances

Security Group

ElastiCache Cluster

Stateful

TCP socket

HTTP

Spawn

Async

Job

Send

Message

to Client

Availability Zone BAvailability Zone A

Auto Scaling GroupJob Workers

Destination:

Massive Scale

Deployment options

Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an even

easier way for you to quickly deploy and

manage applications in the AWS cloud.

You simply upload your application, and

Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles

the deployment details of capacity

provisioning, load balancing, auto-

scaling, and application health

monitoring

Different Deployment Methods Available

CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s to

create your own templates to describe

the AWS resources, and any associated

dependencies or runtime parameters,

required to run your application.

Once deployed, you can modify and

update the AWS resources in a

controlled and predictable way allowing

you to version control your AWS

infrastructure in the same way as you

version control your software.

Do it yourself

With full API support, you can control

manage and the AWS environment

through scripting, or the console. You

have fine grained control over the

environment.

Alternatively there are a number of third

party tools such as Chef or Puppet to

help manage and build the environment

Game On

Know the audience for our genre

Chose the right platform for your audience

Chose the right Multiplayer for your audience

Have data gathering in place before you release

Create a polished game before release

Understand

your

players

Focus

On

The game

Proven with multiple platforms & genres

Scalable

Reduce the risk & cost of failure

Agility and speed to market

Game On

Understand

your

players

Focus

On

The game

Thank You!

Building

back-ends

For all platforms

Deploy your game and

Evolve with

Configuration management