Gaming companies are facing complex decisions as they try to build gaming infrastructures that can cost-effectively support growth while delivering peak performance for players.
Since downtime equals lost revenue, low adoption and damage to reputation, game publishers aim to ensure a reliable game experience by building out their infrastructure with resiliency and high availability in mind.
Building for Resiliency:
- With a horizontal scaling approach, multiple low-cost servers that are functionally the same are set up to run together using global and local load balancers to route traffic. In the event that one server fails, another automatically picks up the load to prevent downtime. Diversifying these loads across VMs, physical servers, data centers and geographies provides more and more layers of protection against systematic, large-scale outages.
Building for High Availability:
- Games that are more “fault sensitive,” and that have lower latency requirements such as certain MMOG genres, are often deployed on custom hosting solutions like managed hosting, private cloud or colocation.
- Platforms are built using higher-end equipment and custom configurations that support faster access to storage and more failover options because they are designed to support the specific application.
- High-availability infrastructure and service-level guarantees are constructed for global IP routing and switching, back channel device networking, data center or rack-level power distribution, as well as the server and storage hardware itself.
