Kingnet Technology Case Study

Kingnet Technology is a young, startup company that develops games for worldwide social networks. Since its inception in 2008, the company has grown from 10 employees to 100 employees, evolving into a major provider of social network games.

Based in Shanghai, China, Kingnet Technology recently decided to expand its user base from Chinese social networks to worldwide social networks. However, the company’s infrastructure was unable to efficiently handle the computing volume resulting from the increased number of users. Clearly, it was time to look for an alternative.

With an estimated 30 million installations and 6 million daily active users, Kingnet Technology needed an infrastructure capable of handling tremendous volume. Affordability was also a major consideration in finding a solution. After trying several international providers, Kingnet Technology decided that the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure provided the best solution for its computing requirements.

Kingnet Technology currently uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The features of Amazon EC2 are ideal for a game developer like Kingnet. Because clients use capacity only as needed, they can adjust capacity as dictated by changes in usage. Amazon EC2 enables Kingnet to easily increase capacity during peak gaming times and reduce capacity during slower gaming times. In addition, clients pay only for the computing capacity that is actually used, making Amazon EC2 an extremely cost-effective solution.

As social network memberships steadily increase, social games are becoming very popular. Kingnet Technology is already planning ways to manage the increased volume resulting from the rising social gaming trend. Yong Zhao, Chief Financial Officer of Kingnet Technology, explains that the company plans to expand the AWS solution to include Amazon CloudFront because “…we found that AWS is the most scalable and cost-effective solution. The cloud architecture is a perfect match for fast-growing social game companies like us.”