AWS Supports Sony Interactive Entertainment to Scale Its PlayStation™ Network Microservices to Serve Millions of Players

Since launching the original PlayStation console in December 1994, Sony Interactive has continually evolved its systems from PlayStation 2 (PS2) , PlayStation 3 (PS3™) , PlayStation 4 (PS4) and its latest console PlayStation 5 (PS5™), which released in November 2020. In 2006, Sony Interactive launched the PlayStation Network (PSN) online service, delivering online multiplayer action, enabling communication between gamers and introducing other interactive features.

At of the end of December 2023, PSN’s monthly active users (MAU) number was approximately 123 million. PSN ran on an on-premises infrastructure when the service launched, but Sony Interactive adopted AWS before the release of PS4 in November 2013.

Yu Suefuji, Director, NPX Gaming Experience and Services Dept., Gaming SRE Section at Sony Interactive explains, “In addition to AWS offering a cost effective solution compared to that of data centers, we believed that it could also resolve issues such as forecasting capacity and planning. This removes the burden of operating in a data center.”

In addition, to deal with the challenge of the mixed environment with the on-premise PS3 generation system and the need to update its servers, Sony Interactive subsequently migrated the PS3 systems to AWS as well. It also migrated PS4 services from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to containers based on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), shifting to microservices and a cloud-native environment. Subsequently, a CI/CD environment was established, and a DevOps system was put in place.

When developing services for PS5, Sony Interactive further accelerated its shift to microservices and serverless architecture. It adopted Amazon DynamoDB to improve database scalability, mainly utilizing Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as the cache layer. 

After the launch of PS5, Sony Interactive experienced a surge in processing asynchronous communication between microservices, such as asynchronous cache updates, linked resource updates, and user notifications. It built a virtual pipeline capable of Pub/Sub messaging that can communicate resource updates with AWS managed services such as Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon Kinesis.

Kohei Azuma, Staff System Architect, NPX Platform Engineering Dept., Service Platform Development Section, recalls, “By updating our own resources and sending notifications into a pipeline that usually required internal API processing updates, it was possible to establish distant relationships processed by receiving notifications on the linked side.”

With PS5, Sony Interactive shifted to a cloud-native architecture by building a submission system on AWS for its developers, an upgrade from how it used to run its submissions on-premises until PS4. The submission system requires processes such as the uploading and conversion of large-volume binary files and while it previously used other third-party high-speed data transfer software, it switched to AWS Transfer for SFTP with the launch of PS5.

Sony Interactive leverages AWS StepFunctions for workflow management between services and the linked operation of synchronous/asynchronous processing, while it runs Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS to link within company-internal systems.

Tsuneo Kasawa, Director, NPX Gaming Experience and Services Dept., Publishing System Development Section says, “Many of the binary files of games are larger than 100GB, and we needed to support exchanges among developers around the world. This is where we saw an advantage with leveraging mega cloud strength because it has globally segregated regions that can allow for the transfer of data at high speed.”

During the preparation for PS5’s launch, Sony Interactive needed to maintain and manage services designed for PS4 while developing new functions for the soon to be launched PS5. The company used AWS Infrastructure Event Management (AWS IEM) to prepare for a seamless launch specifically, by leveraging the expertise of AWS’s technical account manager (TAM) and solution architect (SA). The experts helped Sony Interactive secure its resources and flex capacity consumption limits based on information shared about service and architecture requirements.

“We requested capacity on a scale of several million in Amazon DynamoDB, and this was dealt with very smoothly by sharing the architecture and demand with TAM. Around the PS5 launch, Sony Interactive also engaged in close to real-time communication with TAM and SA. Particularly, TAM’s support and investigation immediately after the launch, when an unexpected load occurred in the Redis Cluster of Amazon ElastiCache with the certain service, enabled a smooth launch.” says Suefuji.