How Supercell Runs Giant Games with Tiny Teams on AWS

Supercell is a mobile games company founded in 2010 in Helsinki, Finland. It has offices in the United States, China, Japan, Korea, and Denmark. Supercell has 100 million daily active users with 4 million concurrent players at peak times, producing 500 TB of data a day. In this video, Heikki Verta, head of engineering at Supercell, explains how its 20-person game teams run some of the world’s most popular titles, including Clash of Clans and Boom Beach. The teams have a high degree of autonomy over the games they build and maintain. On the Clash of Clans team, 3 server developers maintain more than 2,000 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and 300 MySQL databases, as well as developing the game. They achieve this with loosely coupled, well-architected microservices, using infrastructure as code to automate scaling and recovery. The company also makes use of managed services like Amazon DynamoDB where possible, so teams spend less time on infrastructure administration.