Green Horse Games Achieves Stability, Scalability, and Security Using AWS

Initially, Green Horse Games chose to work with AWS Partner CloudHero to migrate half of its workloads using containers and Kubernetes to AWS. “Our partnership with CloudHero goes way back, so when the decision to migrate came about, we knew we could trust its teams throughout the process,” says Stroe.A few months after the initial successful migration, Green Horse Games chose to migrate the rest of its infrastructure to AWS. “After our first migration was completed, we were much more confident about moving the rest of our systems,” says Stroe.The Green Horse Games infrastructure is now stable, reliably available for customers, and scalable to variable demand. The company has also optimized costs because it only pays for the resources it uses, and its developers are able to focus on game development and feature updates instead of managing infrastructure. In addition, the company is confident its customers will have a responsive user experience. “The infrastructure now scales automatically to match demand, so our customers have the best gaming experience,” says Stroe.

Green Horse Games and CloudHero used the AWS Database Migration Service, a managed migration and replication service that helps migrate database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime. “We chose the AWS Database Migration Service because of all the benefits AWS provides to companies enrolling in this program,” says Stroe. “The migrations both went smoothly and AWS helped us mitigate the costs of building a parallel infrastructure.”
Green Horse Games uses Amazon Elastic Container Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to host all the APIs for its games, as well as WebSockets and other internal services. It also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and Amazon ElastiCache, to increase performance with in-memory caching. “Moving to a Kubernetes setup was seamless,” says Stroe. “The CPU usage on AWS was more efficient compared to our previous providers. This allowed us to downsize the servers and lower our costs.”
To improve security, Green Horse Games used Amazon CloudWatch, to observe and monitor resources and applications on AWS, on premises, and on other clouds. “We found our security really easy to set up,” says Stroe. “Using Amazon CloudWatch we can now easily detect any intrusions.”
To store all its games Docker images, it used Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), a fully managed container registry, that lets Green Horse Games easily store, share, and deploy its container software anywhere.
Green Horse Games has also revamped its development processes to increase the quality and quantity of software updates. “Our developers can now focus on producing safer code faster,” says Stroe. “We have built CI/CD pipelines and automated as many processes as possible using an infrastructure as code approach.” Finally, Green Horse Games applied proven, best-practice procedures using automation and created tailored training programs for its staff.

Streaming games to Facebook requires the games’ provider to comply with specific security and encryption standards. Prior to its migration, Green Horse Games was struggling with its Facebook compliance requirements, but since migrating to AWS they are simpler to fulfill. “It’s now much easier to be compliant with Facebook,” says Stroe. “Features like audit logging, encryption, and security scanning are just one click away. Having these functionalities managed by using AWS is a huge benefit for us.”Green Horse Games continues to grow in popularity and is looking at further expansion into more countries around the world. Stroe is happy with the new infrastructure. “It’s now easy to scale our games to meet rising demand, and to date, we’ve had no outages,” says Alex Stroe. “We will continue to benefit from using AWS for every new game we produce.”