Using RightScale To Scale Your Online Game

Hunter of RightScale talks about their cloud management platform

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/right-scale-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Hunter: My name is Hunter Williams, and I’m a Senior Account Manager at RightScale.

Interviewer: What’s RightScale about?

Hunter: RightScale is a cloud management platform designed to manage the largest applications in the cloud. So, we run the top Amazon Web Services as well as a number of other providers. We are an extraction layer that allows you to quickly and easily play applications in the cloud.

Interviewer: Why would game developers use your service then? I know there are traditional games and console games. What kind of games are using your service?

Hunter: Zynga and PlayFish, EA, CrowdStars, SlashKey are all customers of ours. We have extensive experience with the biggest games and the biggest players in the industry. Our team has worked hand-in-hand with all of these teams to build their environments. We also run the other large applications, not just games, but for the E. I. Lilly’s and the Pharmas of the world as well.

Interviewer: Do folks then just use your service to scale it, or do they have to keep something in mind? I mean, how do game developers get started wit actually using your service, and when will they need your service?

Hunter: You know, game developers can use our service from day one. They can use the single server environments in our free developer account to quickly bring up and test out games and try things out. They then can quickly migrate to a scalable and distributed environment, the idea being that once they’ve come up with an idea they can quickly go to market. They can scale it up and scale it down. We try to take the consideration of scaling out of the equation and just make that pretty straightforward and let them focus on their application.

Interviewer: In terms of scaling, what do developers have to think about when they’re designing their game so that it will be easily scalable under your service or whatever service?

Hunter: You know, one of the big things you definitely want to consider is sharding of your database down the road. All of the largest gaming customers in the world use sharding to do that. They use a sharded, replicated MySQL or NoSQL environment. It’s definitely worth considering upfront that you may need a shard down the road.

Interviewer: So, in terms of sharding, are you just talking about partitioning the data so that it’s easy to break up or what?

Hunter: What was that?

Interviewer: Are you talking about partitioning the data so that it’s easy to spread across different databases?

Hunter: Exactly. So, you can segregate the records into A through B in this database, C through D in this database, and then at the application level you need to be able to direct those requests verbally.

Interviewer: And at the application level, do folks need to have one piece of data in each, like, on separate tables, or can they have a table with multiple columns for scaling?

Hunter: I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that question.

Interviewer: Sure. So, folks can use your free service to get started. What are some of the other issues that you’ve seen that indie game developers, smaller game developers, should keep in mind as they are going to scale a service?

Hunter: The database is a big part. You always want to consider caching, and caching is what all the big players use. It’s a very effective way to do it. Men cache is, I think, the choice that most of them make. There are some other solutions out there, like Carters AI cache works for some of them as well. They do full transactional caching so they cache the entire – all the way from the loading and everything.

Some of the other things are load balancing and understanding how to be able to scale your friend, so that if you go from zero to a hundred million users you can still accept all those requests. Some of the other considerations are around geographic load balancing and distribution of the content. You also want to make sure you’re running in a redundant and scalable environment. So, that’s also important.

Interviewer: How is this different than some folks that want to use AppEngine to cover their own game or to run their own game on AppEngine, Google AppEngine?

Hunter: So, Google AppEngine is a great service. It is a platform as a service as compared to RightScale which is more of the tools that you can use to build a platform as a service. It’s customized to your needs so that you can use your application of choice. You can create your code of choice. You’re not locked into sort of their small framework of hyphon [?]. You also can, you know, RightScale allows you to build what app engine you had in a very short amount of time.

Interviewer: Cool. And where can game developers get started?

Hunter: Where?

Interviewer: With your service?

Hunter: Visit rightscale.com and sign up for a free trial. It runs indefinitely.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.