Gaming cloud

How Gaming Companies Are Serving Millions of Gamers From the Cloud

Customer Profile

Our client is a leading U.S. based mobile media company. As an application development company, it is a challenge to be innovative in a dynamic changing market environment. Their team is developing an Augmented Reality (AR) content, games as well as applications that interact with the real world and push the limit of what can be done on mobile devices. In order to meet market requirements, our client must be able to give a quick response to a huge amount of requests. Not only that, but the large numbers of customers are in various locations around the world. In this situation, the search for appropriate cloud services for gaming would prove to be challenging.

For example, for just one of their games the company serves over 450,000 registered users sending 80 requests per second from 75,000 locations worldwide.

Our client realized that they needed a partner who could assist with the handling of their dynamic requirements. After an extensive evaluation the client decided to the CloudSigma public cloud platform because we could deliver the flexibility, resources, and personalized service required by the client for their needs compared with their previous providers.

“One of the most important components of our location-based games is the map tile technology, which shows user’s position in the real world and really immerses them in their surroundings. This requires a lot of CPU, but comparatively little RAM. CloudSigma was the only provider that let us pick and choose exactly what we needed, which was a huge cost benefit too as it avoided any over- or under-provisioning.”Vice President of Game Platforms @ client company

The Challenge

The adaptation of the preferred applications or operating systems to the restrictions of the cloud provider is considered by our client to be critical. Furthermore, it is a common practice from many cloud providers to bundle different types and amount of resources which is suitable only for limited customer groups and causes inefficiencies. These types of offerings affect negatively cloud users such as this client because they end up purchases significant amounts of resources that they never actually use.

The client correctly identified storage as one of the biggest barriers for companies looking to transition to the cloud. The growth in large-scale virtual deployments has caused a surge in the amount of random input/output (I/O) operations between virtual machines (VMs) and magnetic storage systems. As I/O operations become even more random in multitenant, public cloud environments, magnetic storage solutions that rely on physical, spinning disks simply cannot keep up. CloudSigma’s unique high performance clustered three copy SSD solution was able to meet the exacting demands of this particular client.

“When we were working with our previous provider, our MySQL Cluster database would go down several times a week. Sometimes, even multiple times a day. In addition to that, they were not able to explain the reasons for these interruptions.”

A key success factor for the customer was the level of technical support provided. This was especially true during the migration and deployment phases. They appreciated the operational transparency once things were migrated to the cloud. This allowed them to maintain a very high level of uptime needed for their business activities. A move from their existing setup to the cloud, therefore, could present a significant issue in these areas if not correctly addressed.

The Solution

Our client was happy to find that CloudSigma’s completely open software layer imposed no restrictions related to their preferred applications or operating systems. It allowed them to essentially mirror their on-premise environment.

“With CloudSigma we were able to migrate our existing infrastructure 1:1 to the cloud, without the need to modify anything in the applications.”

An additional reason that convinced the client to work with CloudSigma is the tailor-made offer of resource provisioning. CloudSigma is able to satisfy the customer’s requirements much better than other providers because of the flexibility of its services. The platform allows clients to only purchase those resources they actually need. Not to mention the ability to finely tune cloud servers to meet the specific application requirements on a virtual server by server basis. That is how CloudSigma helps its customers to avoid financial waste and achieve the highest levels of performance from applications.

“The fact that CloudSigma gave us the flexibility to specify RAM, CPU and disk components independently is a huge advantage.”Vice President of Game Platforms @ client company

A further advantage of CloudSigma is the implemented an all-SSD-based infrastructure. This implementation helps eliminate the growing storage bottlenecks and variable performance in the cloud.

CloudSigma collaborates with diverse cloud users with a wide range of specific requirements. The secret for its success in such a complex environment is to provide the exact amount of support they need. CloudSigma is always maintaining complete transparency and a responsive level of support – something our customers appreciate above all else.

The Impact

“In stark contrast, the individual, personal attention we’ve received from CloudSigma has been outstanding. That’s probably the number one reason we have stayed with CloudSigma, even beyond their great flexibility, reliability, and availability. The level of responsiveness shown by their team has left us feeling extremely confident in our decision to use CloudSigma. We know that, with CloudSigma, we would never be left out in the cloud with our servers down!”Vice President of Game Platforms @ client company

Thanks to CloudSigma, our client is able to keep reinventing their customers’ reality and providing innovative entertainment for users worldwide.

Currently, our partner benefits not just from the customized provisioning we offer, but also from the high level system reliability.

“That was one of the primary reasons that attracted us to CloudSigma. Not only did they have better stability and fewer outages, but they were more cost-effective. They allowed us to provide only the smaller resources that we needed. Hence, they empower us to vary our compute resources individually, rather than bundling them together. This is a big benefit for many businesses like us.”

The individualized attention provided by CloudSigma and the high level of responsiveness has reassured them that their servers are safe.

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About Vanya Nikova

Vanya is leading the Global Customer Development Team at CloudSigma. Beside that, she is responsible for a number of big data and big science partners and projects at CloudSigma. She has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Mannheim, Germany with 10 years of work experience in sales and consulting services.