Migrating Entire Infrastructure to AWS in 45 Days with VUVY

Turkish gaming company VUVY began in 1999 as a part of Mynet, a major internet portal, and soon emerged as one of Mynet’s most important services. VUVY became one of the largest game studios in Türkiye and was spun off as a separate company in 2019. It was running its infrastructure on premises, but its large game portfolio and growing user base required a more agile and efficient setup. Instead of continually running its infrastructure at the highest possible capacity, VUVY wanted to modernize its applications so that they would scale efficiently.

Before the migration, the teams at VUVY and Onkatec, a company specializing in cloud DevOps and an AWS Partner, had meetings and analyzed VUVY’s system requirements. “The teams worked on various cases and scenarios. We were looking for new technologies and saw what AWS could do,” says Barkın Belen, DevOps engineer at VUVY. “It was offering better virtual machines, automatic scaling options, better security, and better storage opportunities than competitors.” With the personal information of millions of players, VUVY also wanted the security and support that it could gain by running on AWS.

The company decided to migrate its entire on-premises application to AWS. “We were trying to prepare for the AWS services, and Onkatec played a crucial role in it,” says Belen. “Onkatec helped us with the transformation of our monolithic application into a container-based architecture, making it suitable for microservices and scalable operations. Onkatec created the AWS infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code tools and prepared special scripts for database migrations.”

First, the Onkatec and VUVY teams assessed their applications and determined the best architecture on AWS. Developers from Onkatec and VUVY worked in pairs to deploy services in Docker containers while prioritizing scalability and availability using Kubernetes. “We needed to optimize the code so that our applications would operate with minimal resource usage,” says Belen.

Afterward, the companies migrated all VUVY’s data from an on-premises MySQL database to Amazon Aurora, which offers high performance and availability on a global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Onkatec successfully deployed the “Dockerized” applications on Kubernetes, which it configured on AWS through its continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline.

The migration took only about 45 days, and VUVY completed it at the end of 2023. Throughout the migration, the company implemented DevOps processes and received support from AWS, including from the dedicated AWS for Games team located in Türkiye. “AWS gives excellent support to its customers, and it’s always ready to help,” says Belen.

VUVY has seen significant improvements by migrating from on-premises servers and databases to AWS. VUVY manages its containerized applications, game servers, authentication, and all the features of its games using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service for running Kubernetes in the AWS Cloud. It also uses the automatic scaling features of Amazon EKS to seamlessly match the demand of users. The infrastructure is now more efficient because it no longer runs at full capacity all the time. VUVY has also reduced latency by 30 percent using Amazon EKS, which is critical for its multiplayer games. “When the loading speed of our games increases, users experience better gameplay,” says Fuat Şeker, chief operating officer at VUVY. “Then, we observe an improvement in the retention rates of new users.” Since the migration to AWS, VUVY has increased new user retention by 10 percent.

The number of monthly active players has increased, too. “Monthly users of our games have increased since the migration to AWS, and we’ve gotten feedback from our BI Team stating that players have reported an improved user experience with their data,” says Belen. This is partly because VUVY has made development faster and upload times shorter in the cloud so that it can deliver new game features and bug fixes to players 25–30 percent faster than before. In addition, the company has accelerated database query times by 500 percent on Amazon Aurora.

VUVY can handle the increase in users efficiently because it’s spreading application traffic between containers using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which automatically distributes network traffic to improve application scalability. VUVY no longer has to worry about managing infrastructure capacity, buying new hardware, or spinning up new environments quickly. “With the infrastructure as code that we implemented through our AWS journey, it really helped us create our environments faster and control them better,” says Belen. “We can spin up new environments with just one click.”

On AWS, VUVY has strengthened its security. All its applications and databases are inside private subnets, which don’t connect to the public internet. The company also uses VPN servers within the AWS environment, so there’s no outside access to its servers. And now that its infrastructure runs on AWS, VUVY is attracting more talent to its team. “We’ve accelerated our hiring process simply by mentioning that we work on AWS,” says Şeker.

VUVY continues to develop casual mobile games for players around the world. During the migration to AWS, it identified opportunities to reduce costs, and that’s next on the company’s agenda. It is also planning more optimizations to further improve its operations and the player experience.

“This migration means that we can focus on core business activities while the robust cloud security features and global scalability are handled by AWS,” says Şeker.