In this article , we will see how Ubisoft uses Amazon Web Services i.e. AWS.
What is Ubisoft and What it do?
Ubisoft is a leading creator, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment. It is a French Video Game Company headquartered in Montreuii and established in 1986. Ubisoft’s teams are committed to delivering original and memorable gaming experiences across all popular platforms, including multiplayer experiences enjoyed by millions of gamers around the world. Some big games produced by this company are :- Assassins’s Creed, Far Cry, Tom Clancy’s Series, Watch Dogs, Rayman and Just Dance. In 1996, started it’s worldwide journey and by 2004, it has established worldwide.
A Better Way to Manage a Multiplayer Gaming Platform
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. — Eric Fortin
Technical Architect, Ubisoft
Ubisoft creates original content and one of the games Watch Dogs, a game that follows the adventures of a computer hacker.
When they thought of sequeal of Watch Dogs, they uses there service Storm. Storm is company’s multiplayer technology platform, where people can compete against each other in real time but Eric Fortin, technical architect at Ubisoft Montreal said : “ The Storm platform uses servers to relay game traffic, but we had some technical issues ”.
Ubisoft needs an easier way to scale their multiplayer traffic, so they decided to switch their Storm platform to Amazon’s AWS as Fortin says “ We wanted to automatically scale our service to support the large traffic increases we see during the holidays each year. ” They don’t have much developer people, so they want to focus on their development rather than the backend services.
They Found Agility and Scalability in the AWS Cloud
They decided to move Storm platform and several other multiplayer games as they found the cloud is simple to manage and increase realiablity and scalability. After testing Amazon AWS, Fortin says “ The range of services provided by AWS is overwhelming, so the decision was easy for us. ”
After that Ubisoft other departments also switched to AWS to meet the demand and for more speed production of other games.
We saw how effective AWS was in terms of scalability and agility, and that definitely influenced our decision to go with AWS.
Ubisoft moved their development, staging, and production environments to AWS and using atleast 40 Amazon Elastic Compute (Amazon EC2) Instances. They also uses their Auto Scaling feature for automated provisioning of compute resources. They take advantage of Amazon EC2 container service to manage the Storm.
They have been scheduling Docker Service for themselves but AWS EC2 make it way easy for them. Ubisoft also uses Amazon ElastiCache ( allows you to seamlessly set up, run, and scale popular open-Source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud ) to set up and manage distributed in-memory data stores.
Simplifying Management Using Containers
Scalability is important for Ubisoft and they don’t spin up new stacks for each game to meet demand. Using AWS, Ubisoft can now automatically scale to support large traffic. “ 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.” says Fortin.
The company can more easily manage their Storm service using Amazon ECS. They use Amazon ECS for orchestration and deployment for Storm. And combining with Auto Scaling, the company don’t have to worry about the traffic as AWS does everything for them. Fortin said that they operated 120 servers using three people because they didn’t have to worry and spend time on the backend. “Instead of installing and overseeing a management and orchestration tool ourselves — which would have taken us weeks — we configured our service to support the traffic spike in a few days using Amazon ECS.” says Fortin.
Deploying Global Updates in Minutes
Ubisoft is more agile because it runs its solution in the cloud. Using AWS, they have the agility which they couldn’t obtain themselves in their IT environment. As a result, they can spin up a new Redis database in a few seconds using Amazon ElastiCache, instead of installing and configuring the database on their own. Taking advantage of this Ubisoft can deploy new features and updates more quickly than before. “We do rolling deployments in three regions in less than 30 minutes, because we use Amazon ECS for all our updates,” says Fortin. “By using AWS, we have the autonomy to try new things very quickly, so we don’t spend weeks investigating something to see if it will work. That speed and agility ultimately makes us more competitive.”
Glance at the AWS Services use by Ubisoft
- Amazon EC2 ( Elastic Cloud )
- Amazon ECS ( Elastic Container Service )
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Auto Scaling
Benefits of AWS
- Quickly scale to support demand of 80,000 players.
- Deploys global game-service updates in less than 30 minutes.
- Increases competitiveness through speed and agility
