NetEase Games

AWS Case Study: NetEase Games

2022

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".

Challenges

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 Case Study: NetEase Games
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Knives Out, a game from NetEase Games, has achieved 40% of Amazon EC2 cost savings by replacing the fourth generation instance with the fifth generation instance of Amazon EC2 M5. Audio and voice services and network forwarding services have saved Amazon EC2 costs by up to 50% by using Amazon EC2 A1 instances.”

Sun Guoliang

NetEase Games, Expert Cloud Solution Architect

Why AWS?

  • Rich instance types to meet various business requirements
  • As a global pioneer of cloud computing, AWS provides a powerful combination of cloud services to meet NetEase Games’ requirements for performance and resource resiliency. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides more than 270 types of cloud server instance, you can select different CPU, memory, network, storage types and configurations according to different application scenarios.

    For example, the fifth generation instance of Amazon EC2, launched in early 2018, uses AWS's innovative Nitro system, which has significantly improved its performance and impressed NetEase Games team. It was Spring Festival when the number of Knives Out players rose sharply. To a network-intensive application such as Knives Out, one single fifth generation instance of Amazon EC2 could support up to 8 elastic NICs, with the network load balancing distributed to 8 CPU cores, and the total utilization rate of computing resources doubled. Replacing the previous fourth generation instance with the fifth generation of Amazon EC2 instance helped save a lot of cost. Moreover, the design of elastic NIC is very flexible. Each website can have multiple IP addresses, which can drift between different instances and is very convenient to use.

    For audio and voice services and network forwarding services, NetEase Games chose Amazon EC2 A1 instance to reduce operating costs. Audio voice service supports real-time player chat, while network forwarding service aims to accelerate game traffic. "Audio voice and network forwarding services are network I/O-intensive, and A1 instances can provide up to 10Gbps of network bandwidth. The business logic of these services is coded in Python, which makes them independent from the platform and can be quickly and easily converted to Amazon EC2 A1 instances." Sun Guoliang, senior cloud solution architect of NetEase Games, said.

    For scalability, Amazon EC2 provides a plenty of interface functions, which can monitor the utilization rate and running status of instances from multiple dimensions, and add, merge and terminate game servers according to the characteristics of different games. For example, it should not terminate a game server when CPU utilization rate become lower. This instance should be hidden and refuse new players to enter, and wait until all players on this instance finished fighting before shutting it down.

  • AWS Global Backbone Network guarantees extreme experience for overseas players
  • The quality of access to the network is crucial to the game player experiences. It is impossible for game publishers to set up game server in every country, what they do is to set up regional general server in the world according to the number of local players to serve. AWS has a backbone network covering the whole world, providing connections of low latency , high throughput and high redundancy for overseas regions. At the same time, AWS has more than 300 access points to further strengthen the coverage of users around the world. Packet loss duration is an indicator used to measure network quality. It refers to the length of time within a day when packets loss higher than normal. Through tests, NetEase Games’IT team found that players around the world are prone to packet loss jitter through Internet connections. However, with using AWS global backbone network, the packet loss time visited by players is significantly reduced. NetEase Games allows players to connect to AWS infrastructures nearby through AWS global access points, and then access general game servers through AWS backbone network, which greatly improved players' game experience.

  • Hundreds of Amazon VPCs are interconnected for flexibility and security
  • In NetEase Games, security control are mainly implemented through Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which usually builds an Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) for each game server. Some internal PaaS such as database, big data, network acceleration, etc. will also establish separate Amazon VPC. NetEase Games has set up hundreds of Amazon VPCs in total. Amazon VPC on AWS is connected to NetEase Games' on-premise data center and third-party data center through the network. Amazon VPC has a wealth of gateways. In addition to supporting Virtual Gateway (VGW), Amazon VPC also supports AWS Transit Gateway, which can greatly simpify the network structure of Amazon VPC interconnection.

    Through AWS’s rich gateways, in addition to cross-Amazon VPCs interconnections, AWS Direct Connect and hybrid architecture connections can be realized through AWS Transit Gateway, which greatly improved flexibility. In 2018, Amazon VPC introduced a new function of cross-regional interconnection, further enhance the flexibility of network architecture and easily switch among various types. NetEase Games also adopted this new function.

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.

The schematic diagram of the AWS-based architecture of Knives Out

Figure 1 The schematic diagram of the AWS-based architecture of Knives Out

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.

The schematic diagram of Amazon VPC architecture used by NetEase

Fig. 2 The schematic diagram of Amazon VPC architecture used by NetEase
Games

Benefits

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.


About NetEase Games

NetEase Games is the online games division of NetEase, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTES and HKEX: 9999), developing and operating some of the most popular mobile and PC games in markets including China and Japan.

Why AWS?

  • Rich instance types to meetvarious business requirements
  • AWS Global Backbone Network guarantees extreme experience for overseas players
  • Hundreds of Amazon VPCs are connected for flexibility and security 

AWS Services Adopted

Amazon EC2

M6g instances

Amazon EC2 M6g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors.

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Amazon EC2

M6i instances

Amazon EC2 M6i instances are powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and deliver up to 15% better price performance compared to M5 instances. 

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AWS

Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves the performance of your users’ traffic by up to 60% using Amazon Web Services’ global network infrastructure.

Learn more »

AWS

Shield Advanced

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS.

Learn more »


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