Delivering a Seamless Gaming Experience to 25 Million Players Using AWS with Travian Games

Founded in Germany in 2005, Travian creates strategy games such as Travian: Legends, Crowfall, and Rail Nation. Its titles are 4X games, which means that players explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate within the game world. “When we’re talking about a game like this, stability is crucial because the games take place in near real time,” says Strathaus.

In 2015, Travian migrated to a private cloud, and then in 2020, it changed its architectural approach and began using a managed Kubernetes service on a different cloud provider. However, the studio continued to need additional stability. “We had outages pretty much every day,” says Daniel Thoma, head of technical operations at Travian Games. “Our developers would spend weeks combing through code trying to find the fault, but they never found anything.” On several occasions, the studio had to implement rollbacks that restored the game to 48-hour-old backups—a frustration point for both Travian and its customers.

Travian needed a more stable service that could handle Kubernetes. The studio was initially hesitant to use AWS because the offerings from AWS are so vast that Travian worried it would be overwhelming. However, as the need for reliability became paramount, Travian decided to give it a try. “We spoke with people at AWS and had the feeling that they want to help us grow,” says Strathaus. “That is exactly what we were looking for.” Travian realized that AWS was willing to collaborate to help Travian learn how to use AWS services to improve its games. The studio scheduled six special workshops, AWS Immersion Days, to learn how to get the most out of AWS services. It then started using AWS in 2021. Within 1 year, Travian’s two biggest games were running completely on AWS.

When Travian migrated its first game to AWS, the results were immediate. “We have no issues,” says Thoma. “The result is what counts, and it’s running. The players don’t see time-out errors. It’s stable. It’s reliable.” On AWS, Travian uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service to run Kubernetes in the cloud. Using the managed worker nodes within Amazon EKS, Travian has a deeper level of management over its container deployments than it did before. Additionally, Travian gained greater scalability by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity. Now, the studio can react more quickly to changes in player demand.

Migrating to AWS also saved time for Travian developers, who no longer need to spend days or weeks combing the code for errors. Instead, they can develop the code further and add value to the game. Travian also increased reliability and reduced the burden on developers by using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up and scale databases in the cloud. “Before we migrated to AWS, the database was not corresponding to the web server fast enough,” says Thoma. “Now, our teams use Amazon RDS easily without doing any of the configuration work that used to be necessary.” After migrating to Amazon RDS, Travian collaborated with the AWS team to optimize its spending. AWS recommended the use of next-generation Amazon RDS General Purpose gp3 storage volumes for Rail Nation. Using gp3 storage volumes, Travian reduced the size of its databases by 50 percent while increasing the rate of input-output operations per second.

Travian is now migrating its business intelligence systems to AWS using Amazon Redshift, which uses SQL to analyze structured and semistructured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes. Using data analytics, Travian will be able to analyze player behavior in the game based on the 11 TB of data that it collects each month and make improvements. “It used to be impossible for us to do this at this scale,” says Strathaus. “We’re looking forward to using analytics to improve our games further on AWS.”

While the increased reliability and new tools have been crucial for Travian, collaborating with the team at AWS has been a major benefit as well. “The most important part of choosing a service provider for me was to find a ‘partner in crime,’ a collaborator who really understands our business and who is there to help us,” says Strathaus. “I’m really happy that we made this move to AWS for Games.”