Delivering a Reliable CDN and Game Distribution Service Using Amazon CloudFront with Upsoft

Based in Poland, Upsoft simplifies game hosting, content management, and more so that game developers can focus on the creative process. The company’s PatchKit solution includes PatchKit Launcher, which handles game activation and user authentication, and PatchKit CDN, which provides fast, secure content distribution with no additional configuration required.

The challenge for Upsoft was building PatchKit on a reliable foundation that its customers would know they could trust. “With a service like ours, the biggest issue is trust,” says Piotr Korzuszek, chief executive officer (CEO) of Upsoft. “Our clients need to trust that we’ll stick around after they decide to use us.”

Upsoft had built the initial versions of PatchKit by using multiple smaller CDNs and its own virtual private servers. However, this required a lot of maintenance and resulted in high distribution costs. Worse, these attempts didn’t prove reliable, and customers noticed. “The moment we published our first post about PatchKit on social media, our service went down,” says Korzuszek. Upsoft wasn’t happy with the downtime its clients were experiencing, partly as a result of electronic service providers blocking its virtual private servers and interrupting software downloads. Players depend on a service being available at all times, and any downtime creates a bad user experience.

Upsoft needed a more reliable foundation for PatchKit. After testing several cloud providers, the company decided to migrate the solution to AWS because of its reliability and compatibility with its specific needs. Upsoft had already been running much of the rest of its infrastructure on AWS for years.

As a result, the migration of its CDN to Amazon CloudFront took just 1 month. The company did extensive testing to make sure everything would work properly on the new system. At one point, it was running two CDNs—the old version on its custom infrastructure and the new version on Amazon CloudFront. It used a copy of all its resources on Amazon CloudFront to test each step until it was ready to migrate fully to the new system.

PatchKit has been available since 2015, and the migration to Amazon CloudFront was complete in 2022. Immediately, the migration to AWS had a significant impact. “2022 was the first year we had profit from our service,” says Korzuszek.

After migrating to AWS, Upsoft quickly saw significant improvements in its data transfers, availability, and the all-important factor: client trust. “This was game changing, because this was the moment when we could tell our clients, ‘Hey, you can trust us because we’re hosting on AWS,’” says Korzuszek.

The biggest advantage of using Amazon CloudFront is that Upsoft doesn’t have to use different points of presence all over the world to deliver content globally. And it’s still delivering content faster than it used to. Average data speeds in Poland are about 100 Mbps. On Amazon CloudFront, PatchKit is delivering content at the full bandwidth speed available. Further, Upsoft has accelerated content publishing by more than 50 percent and improved the stability of this process.

Upsoft’s clients experienced better reliability and fewer interruptions. “All of the incorrect content blocking stopped as soon as we switched to Amazon CloudFront,” says Korzuszek. The company estimates that, on its previous solution, about 10 percent of users complained about data transfers. After switching to Amazon CloudFront, the company estimates that less than 1 percent experience any issues.

Upsoft also improved its authentication process for specific resources using AWS Lambda, which businesses can use to run code without thinking about servers or clusters. It’s handling JSON web tokens for authentication requests more reliably using Lambda@Edge, a feature of Amazon CloudFront that helps businesses run code closer to users. And to locate any code issues, Upsoft set up Sentry, an application that developers can use to monitor application code health. “So, if anything happens, we can just check out what happened, try to optimize it, and fix it,” says Korzuszek.

Overall, the company has less infrastructure to manage and maintain. “We used to spend 25 percent of our time each month on software upgrades, bug fixes, and general server maintenance,” says Korzuszek. Now, Upsoft is using just two Amazon CloudFront distributions—Europe and North America—to serve most of its clients. “The clients are really happy about our data transfer speeds,” says Korzuszek.

Upsoft communicated closely with the AWS account manager and solutions architect throughout the migration. “We had many online calls with the AWS team,” says Korzuszek. “I was really happy that I could speak to them whenever I needed, and I felt quite confident with this support.” And when a billing issue arose, AWS communicated with the company and quickly corrected the information. “I was very happy with the support,” says Korzuszek. “Everyone handled the case professionally.”