With the flexibility of Amazon Web Services, Aquiris serves millions of online gamers flawlessly

2022

Aquiris is today one of the largest game developers in the country, recognized for popular games such as the racing arcade Horizon Chase Turbo, the creative Wonderbox: The Adventure Maker and the mobile F2P Looney Tunes - World of Mayhem. The company, which initially only developed its games, started using the cloud and AWS services to bring them to users, allowing hundreds of thousands of daily active players and millions of flawless sessions.

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The AWS services were fundamental for us to focus on the development of the game, and not on the necessary infrastructure. This simplified management. Without AWS, I would have to have a dedicated team for that and today I don't have to worry about changing machines, firewalls etc.”

Raphael Baldi
CTO of Aquiris

 

From game development to active managing

Founded in Porto Alegre (RS) in 2007, Aquiris today creates games for the most diverse platforms, from browser to PC, consoles and mobile. With a team of around 190 people, the company focuses on delivering the best artistic, technical and gameplay quality to its players, always with powerful editorial partners. Recently, for example, the company announced a strategic partnership with Epic Games.

The first games date from2007 and, until 2010, they were basically developed in partnership with advertising agencies, which were responsible for their management. “At the time, the partners made the games available and managed them. Our focus was only on development,” recalls Aquiris Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Raphael Baldi.

Over time, those projects began to be managed by Aquiris itself. In 2010, in partnership with a Korean publisher, they launched the FPS Ballistic Overkill, the first project in which Baldi's team was also responsible for controlling the infrastructure. The executive says that until then they were used to working with on-premises servers, which forced them to scale the architecture manually as the game gained public.

Based on the success of Ballistic, the company decided that it was time to look for partners to help them scale this architecture, in addition to simplifying the management of these projects. The focus was on finding a cloud provider that would meet this demand.

Simplified management with AWS

In 2013, after an analysis of existing providers on the market, Aquiris brought the entire Ballistic framework to AWS. “AWS was the only cloud provider that demonstrated that it was prepared for the type of operation we wanted, with machines available, easy to install and operate,” he says, recalling that in 2015 the company experimented with another provider, more focused on Android, but the difficulty of operating the platform only reinforced the choice for AWS.

In 2016, Aquiris, now in partnership with North American mobile game publisher Scopely, began the development of Looney Tunes - World of Mayhem on the AWS framework, the first of its newly created DevOps core. With this project, the company massively increased the use of AWS, with all managed data and network services.

“The AWS services were fundamental for us to focus on the development of the game, and not on the infrastructure needed. This simplified management. Without AWS, I would have to have a dedicated team for that and also worry about changing machines, firewalls, etc.”, he celebrates, stressing that much of the game's success is due to the elasticity of the AWS structure.

When Looney Tunes was released, Aquiris registered 1.5 million downloads on the first day, without any glitches. The result led the company to concentrate its new projects on the AWS cloud. Since then, two more projects have been carried out and another one is being developed, all of them being multiplayer and having multiple accounts.

Based on these characteristics, Aquiris built a platform within AWS, defining an infrastructure that will be common to all the games to be created. “With AWS, we have a framework based on everything that the company offers. The games use the same stack version and practically the same backend. The differentiation is made by modules developed for each project individually,” explains Baldi.

The platform uses AWS services such as Amazon FSx, a shared drive fundamental for creating new instances and retrieving configurations; Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which stores game data and configurations; Amazon CloudFront, for distributing artifacts and simplifying access from players to game data; Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), for storing images; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), for workloads on Windows and Linux instances. Baldi also highlights the use of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and the network resources used for routing.

“Because we have a small infrastructure team, we make extensive use of the organization's account control (AWS Organizations). We make use of it and all the intelligence that AWS brings us to resource management. This simplifies our operation and reduces the need for professionals for something that is not the purpose of the company. The administration has information without the need for a technical person to translate this data,” he says.
 

Integrated platform for different projects

With the use of the platform created within the AWS infrastructure, Aquiris today has three games in production, totaling more than 1 million active players. The elasticity of the platform allows Aquiris to deliver over 900 weekly builds across the three projects, including testing, development and production builds.

Another opportunity identified by the development team is the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. “Each project had its own system and managed its own platform, security features, network, etc. We now use the platform to accomplish all of this, including proofs of concept before launch. Today we work with two game engines, each with its own peculiarities,” he says.
 

Focus on what brings value

According to Baldi, Aquiris's goal is to bring its entire development platform inside AWS: “Today we use less time controlling infrastructure, less time operating conventional resources, and I focus my team's efforts on what really brings us value”.  


About Aquiris

Aquiris is a company based in Porto Alegre, Brazil. With 15 years of history and a team of 190 people, we create games for the most diverse platforms, from browser to PC, consoles and mobile. Our main focus from the beginning has been to deliver the best artistic, technical, and gameplay quality to our players, together with powerful editorial partners. Aquiris is known for the acclaimed arcade racing Horizon Chase Turbo, the fast FPS Ballistic Overkill and the mobile F2P Looney Tunes - World of Mayhem.

Aquiris was founded in 2007 by Amilton Diesel, Mauricio Longoni and Israel Mendes. They teamed up to develop virtual reality and advergames in a 30, square-meter office. 20 games later, they gained experience to expand the company to 190 people, including three new partners: Raphael Baldi, Kely Costa and Sandro Manfredini. Today Aquiris works with its own securities and large franchises in partnership with major partners.

Benefits of AWS

  • 3 games under production, totaling more than 1 million active players;
  • 900 weekly builds delivered across the three projects;
  • Resetting the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.  

AWS Services Used

Amazon FSx

Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch, run, and scale feature-rich, high-performance file systems in the cloud. It supports a wide range of workloads with its reliability, security, scalability, and broad set of capabilities.

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Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience.

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Amazon ECR

Amazon ECR is a fully managed container registry offering high-performance hosting, so you can reliably deploy application images and artifacts anywhere.

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Amazon VPC

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) gives you full control over your virtual networking environment, including resource placement, connectivity, and security.

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