Ubisoft’s Online Services Team Reduced Database Costs by 90% Using Amazon DynamoDB

Ubisoft is a global brand that creates and distributes award-winning video games, including Rainbow Six Siege, Assassin’s Creed, and Just Dance. The games use challenges, which are objectives that players can reach to achieve rewards. For example, when players win five matches in a row, they might earn a new skin to change their avatar’s appearance.

Ubisoft’s Challenge Services database contains 20 billion data points that are related to players’ progress toward achieving game challenges. As Ubisoft’s players’ activities grew, the company needed to manage the increasing number of data points. Ubisoft’s legacy managed database service could no longer scale without error and was becoming costly to maintain.

In September 2022, Ubisoft began to explore a migration to Amazon DynamoDB, which other teams at Ubisoft were already using. The Online Services team was drawn to Amazon DynamoDB because of its automatic scaling feature that dynamically adjusts the provisioned throughput capacity in response to traffic patterns.

After a successful proof of concept, the team started the development of the migration solution in early 2023. To provision or shut down the infrastructure and expedite the migration, Ubisoft used AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), which accelerates cloud development using common programming languages to model an organization’s applications. At the time, Ubisoft’s Challenge Services database was receiving the data of an estimated 70,000 player-progression data points every minute. “People around the world are playing our games at any point in time, so we couldn’t shut down the service to complete the migration,” says Nicolas Druet, project manager at Ubisoft.

To extract the data into a temporary Amazon DynamoDB table in document mode, Ubisoft used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)—a managed migration and replication service for migrating database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime and zero data loss. Using an Amazon DynamoDB stream out of this intermediate table, the company completed a more precise data transformation using AWS Lambda—a serverless, event-driven compute service. Ubisoft transformed the data into the final Amazon DynamoDB table, matching the desired data schema, partition key, and global secondary indexes. The company did extensive testing and maintained two databases in sync, reading and writing in both throughout the migration process to validate data integrity.

By May 2023, Ubisoft had run and completed the migration in the production environment in 5 days. “Using AWS, we achieved minimal downtime, no data loss, and no impact on the player experience,” says Marc-Olivier Labarre, lead of the Ubisoft team who performed the migration and maintains the service. After 1 year, Ubisoft increased its computation rate of player-progression data points per minute by nearly 43 percent with no impact on service quality.

Using Amazon DynamoDB, Ubisoft’s Online Services team can now better scale to meet changing traffic needs. This is particularly important when new games are released because it can be challenging to anticipate a game’s popularity and the initial traffic volume can unexpectedly double or triple. Using the automatic scaling feature in Amazon DynamoDB, Ubisoft defines policies so that the service automatically adjusts throughput settings when a workload stays elevated or depressed for a sustained period. With these settings, staff rarely needs to manually adjust the configuration. With the low latency of Amazon DynamoDB, Ubisoft’s backend service can respond in near real time. Additionally, the company uses global secondary indexes to optimize data consumption patterns and costs.

By migrating to Amazon DynamoDB, Ubisoft cut costs for its Online Challenges database by 90 percent. With its legacy database, the company had to set limitations on data usage to keep costs manageable. “We can now scale up using Amazon DynamoDB with a provisioned approach, which gives us full trust in our database solution,” says Sébastien Moulin, tech lead at Ubisoft who designed the solution. “We’ve unlocked the potential for game production teams to configure challenges to better suit their needs.”

The company also reduced operational overhead, freeing up staff to focus on adding new features. With its legacy database, Ubisoft encountered, on average, at least one operational issue every week. Employees needed to resolve issues during each cluster upgrade, and maintenance work was often challenging. Now, Ubisoft has reduced the number of operational issues to almost none. “Amazon DynamoDB is fully managed by the AWS team, and we do not even need to intervene,” says Moulin.

By increasing scalability and reliability, Ubisoft provides an infrastructure that better serves both game productions and players. Adoption is increasing as new games start to use the service and existing games increase usage. One year after the migration, Ubisoft’s app traffic volume has doubled. “With increased quality of service, expanded capacity, and reduced operational issues, we’ve greatly improved our reputation and trust with our internal clients,” says Druet.

As Ubisoft grows and develops new games, the company now has a solution that can scale to handle the increased traffic volume. “The scalability of Amazon DynamoDB was exactly what we needed,” says Moulin. “Using Amazon DynamoDB, we can have a high quality of service even with high traffic.” The company has also maintained 99.99 percent availability to provide its users with uninterrupted access.

The company plans to support continued growth using AWS and will soon offer more personalized objectives and enhanced challenge features through its games. This is expected to increase demand and growth—a scaling challenge that Ubisoft will be able to meet using Amazon DynamoDB. “We can now focus on adding more features around the challenge experience for our players,” says Moulin.