Customer: Zynga

"Most of the automation we’re enjoying has long been standard for RDS, but using Aurora has delivered the automation of RDS along with the performance of self-managed i2 instances. Aurora is now our first choice for new services using relational databases."

- Chris Broglie, Architect (Zynga)

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Customer: PennyPop (player and game state datastore)

PennyPop is the maker of Battle Camp, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in which players fight synchronously and chat in real time. Battle Camp is consistently in the list of the top 100 highest grossing applications in more than 40 countries.

Use case: PennyPop built this MMORPG with a small team of developers and needed to be able to scale out easily but maintain low costs. Using DynamoDB allowed PennyPop to launch with only a few requests per minute and scale to more than 80,000 requests per second. Because DynamoDB is a fully managed service, it allows the small development team to focus on game development and not on operations. Also, by using DynamoDB, PennyPop has saved at least 50 percent per year when compared to hosting and sharding their MySQL database. PennyPop would have needed to double its operations staff from three to six server engineers to run the same environment on-premises.

Design patterns: DynamoDB stores all player and game data, which is partitioned by player ID because it is accessed using the key-value access pattern (1:1 modeling pattern). Each player’s data is Gzipped and stored as a Base64 string to save on costs. Compression reduces the player data to 10 percent of its original size.

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Customer: Rovio Entertainment  

Rovio Entertainment is the Finland-based game developer, publisher, and distributor that owns the Angry Birds franchise. Rovio operates its SQL Server databases on Amazon RDS. Rovio takes its responsibility to customers seriously, and understands that the way it handles customer data is crucial to this. Mikko Peltola, Senior Manager of Cloud Operations at Rovio, finds that the AWS cloud helps him in a number of ways when it comes to security.

“One is that with AWS we have fewer security concerns—we don’t have to worry about data center access controls on a physical level, for example. We also get to benefit from all the development work that AWS does in control, auditability, and encryption.”

Mikko Peltola, Senior Manager of Cloud Operations - Rovio

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Customer: Bandai Namco Studios Inc.

Bandai Namco Studios Inc. began as an independent offshoot of Bandai Namco Games Inc. in Japan. The company develops arcade games, platform-specific software, and social and mobile games. The company decided that using AWS services including Amazon RDS MySQL would provide better performance, lower costs, better security, and greater availability. In particular, Bandai Namco saw the potential benefit in terms of reductions in overhead, especially when it came to adding, modifying, and removing server resources.

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Customer: X.D. Network

X.D. Network is one of the largest mobile game companies in Shanghai, China.

"Ragnarok Online, an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) mobile game we launched in the Korea region in March 2018, needs to constantly update game statistics and player status. The burden of massive write operations can reach 25,000 queries per second easily, which exceeds the limit of traditional MySQL databases. Thanks to the Amazon Aurora database, we can accomplish this without changing any of the code, and even keep latency to less than 35 ms to ensure we can continue to expand our user base. Thanks to the high performance and availability that Amazon Aurora provides, Ragnarok Online reached number one in the free and top-grossing mobile game categories in Korea when it launched."

Tomasen Shen, CTO – X.D. Network Inc.

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Customer: Sumzap, Inc.

Sumzap, Inc. is a Japanese smartphone gaming company that produces Sengoku Enbu -KIZNA-, a game title that was ranked first in the iOS sales rankings multiple times.

“The migration of Sengoku Enbu -KIZNA- from our on-premises data center to AWS was completed very successfully in February 2019. We are now using several Amazon Aurora clusters (MySQL-compatible edition), with our application servers running on Amazon EC2 instances in the same availability zone for low latency. During gaming events, when we have access peaks three times a day, we use auto-scaling and EC2 Spot for our application servers, and have found that both Aurora and EC2 handle these peaks without any issues whatsoever.”

Hiroyuki Ishihara, SRE Team Manager - Sumzap, Inc.

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