AWS Case Study: NetEase Games

NetEase Games is the online games division of NetEase, Inc. developing and operating some of the most popular mobile and PC games in markets including China and Japan. As one of the world's largest incubators of quality online game content, NetEase Games is dedicated to supporting the growth of innovative studios around the globe and growing an international presence along the way. To complement its self-developed games and world-class R&D capabilities, NetEase Games also partners with other industry leaders including Blizzard Entertainment, Mojang AB (a Microsoft subsidiary) and other global game developers to operate some of the most popular international online games in China.At the same time, NetEase Games has cooperated with many overseas copyright owners and obtained well-known IP authorizations such as "Harry Potter", "Marvel", "Lord of the Rings" and "Diablo".

In 2015, NetEase Games began to map out products overseas distribution. At that time, NetEase Games adopted the mode of on-premise data center in China. Considering the overall cost and time investment, NetEase Games determined to use Cloud service due to its higher feasibility. While NetEase Games’ IT team was going to meet all-new challenges.

• First, cloud services are very different from on-premise data centers. Cloud services are virtualized, and cloud resources are elastic. Can virtualized network and server resources meet the needs of gaming business? Which Cloud Service provider's resources have excellent resiliency and scalability and are easy to manage?
• Second, overseas distribution faces the problem of global network differentiation. Can these differences be integrated through the network of Cloud Service providers?
  
• Third, by using cloud services, is it possible to manage network security and data security issues in the same way as on-premise data center?

To answer these questions, NetEase Games’ IT team established a rigorous and thorough cloud evaluation system and conducted a comprehensive and in-depth evaluating of several Cloud Service providers. The evaluation included four aspects: 1) for computing and storage resources, the performance and reliability were the focuse of the evaluation ; 2) For network, IDC connectivity of Cloud Service providers and access quality of player networks were comprehensively evaluated; 3) For security, Cloud Service providers' access control measures and defense capabilities were tested; 4) cost, technical support capability, programmability of cloud service resources were evaluated. With all above done, NetEase Games chose AWS as an important Cloud Service provider for its overseas business. 

AWS's Enterprise Support also provided great help to NetEase Games team. There is a localized supporting team to help solve problems in various regions in the world. It can also connect AWS's global experts through AWS's customer service team, and even directly conduct in-depth discussions with the product research and development team to solve difficult problems in a timely manner, so as to truly become a reliable technical consultant for customers and ensure the rapid development of the business.

FIG. 1 is an AWS-based architecture diagram of NetEase Games’Knives Out. AWS services used include Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) , AWS Certificate Manager, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Shield, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Simple Notification Service( Amazon SNS), Enterprise Support, etc.

Fig. 2 The architecture diagram of Amazon VPC used by NetEase Games, mainly including Amazon VPC, AWS Direct Connect, Internet Gateway (IGW), VPC Peering, VPC Endpoint, etc.

By using AWS, NetEase Games has gained the following benefits:

• First, supporting the rapid growth of overseas business. Through AWS, NetEase Games team has built a cloud infrastructure to easily meet the requirements of the rapid growth of overseas game business. Either the expansion of the coverage area or the rapid growth of the number of local players, the IT team can calmly deal with it.
• Second, deeply using AWS, pursuing extreme performance. AWS has been committed to continuously developing innovative CPU and elastic scaling technologies for different usage scenarios. NetEase Games team promptly followed up and used these new technologies that are continuously upgraded iteratively, bringing great performance improvement to the game server, thus laying an important foundation for Netease Games to win in the fierce competition of the game industry.
• Third, providing first-class game experience for overseas players. Using AWS's stable and reliable cloud service platform and high-quality global backbone network, NetEase Games team was able to build a stable and reliable game environment to ensure a strong development of overseas game business.
• Fourth, based on AWS's new technological advantages, the cost is significantly reduced. NetEase Games team has deeply applied many new functions provided by AWS to meet the needs of rapid business growth while giving consideration to cost performance. Knives Out achieved 40% Amazon EC2 cost savings by replacing the fourth generation instance with the fifth generation Amazon EC2 M5 instance. By using Amazon EC2 A1 instance, audio voice services and network forwarding services have saved up to 50% of Amazon EC2 cost.

On the one hand, NetEase Games team deepened its understanding of AWS Cloud through communication with AWS Product Team. On the other hand, the application scenario of NetEase Games also provided valuable opinions for AWS Product Team. 90% of AWS services and function iterations are from deep users such as NetEase Games. The two parties agreed on mutual benefits, NetEase Games team’s strong technical strength has enabled in-depth exploration and application of AWS's basic services. The outstanding outcome was also accomplished by the strong support from AWS.