Delivering Engaging Games at Scale Using AWS with Whatwapp

Whatwapp was founded in Milan in 2013 by a small team of university students who wanted to reinvent classic cultural card games as video games. A decade later, the app had 29 million downloads, with averages of 900,000 monthly and 300,000 daily users. As it grew, Whatwapp needed to improve scalability and backend management for its games. “At the beginning, we explored different technologies, people were coming and going, and we were changing very quickly,” says Ricardo Gonzalez, technical lead at Whatwapp.

The company needed a solution to more easily share and manage knowledge, such as database and authentication, and features, such as leaderboards and player-to-player challenge matchmaking. Implementing new features took up too much valuable engineering time, and difficulties maintaining capability among game clients led to ever-increasing technical debt and initiated updates that threatened to harm user retention.

To solve these problems, Whatwapp looked to standardize its game infrastructure. “We’re now trying to put down common standards among games, with best practices and a common core, automating as much as possible,” says Gonzalez.

Whatwapp looked to AWS in its effort to standardize its backend operations, avoid constant rewriting, and maintain compatibility with older versions. “We already had an AWS account, so migrating our games to AWS was the best choice for us,” says Gonzalez. One of the services Whatwapp was already using was Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service, for its backend operations. To manage backend game operations, Whatwapp elected to host the Nakama solution on its own Kubernetes clusters using Amazon EKS.

In 2022, Whatwapp conducted a smooth migration with limited disruptions to its live games when it migrated its backend operations to Nakama, running on its own Kubernetes clusters using Amazon EKS. By pairing its own use of AWS services with Nakama, Whatwapp now has a scalable game server that can accommodate 40,000 simultaneous players and gains visibility, time savings, and feature improvements. “Nakama was the game service provider that had all the features that we needed out of the box,” says Giovanni Piumatti, technical lead at Whatwapp. “Our games were already live, and we had a large number of active users. It also let us run code in JavaScript, which allowed us to start from our existing codebase, and that made the migration a lot easier.”

Managing Nakama on Amazon EKS gives Whatwapp greater visibility, meaning the company can alleviate gaming bottlenecks and identify underperforming code. “Now we can see bottlenecks and improve our code. We know how to improve our code base to get the best out of both Nakama and AWS,” says Gonzalez.

Now, sharing features among games takes approximately one-third of the time that it used to take. Developers no longer need to rewrite code for each individual technical stack or push out critical updates to players. Time saved can be spent creating new features to engage players and drive retention.

Because Whatwapp’s games are social multiplayer games, matchmaking—connecting individuals’ and teams’ experience at comparable challenge levels—is particularly critical to user experience and, ultimately, retention. Whatwapp developed its own asynchronous matchmaking feature, which it manages using Nakama. Whatwapp also runs a number of other social and competitive APIs on Nakama, including logins, authentication, chat, near-real-time parties, tournaments, and leaderboards.

Behind the Nakama solution running on Amazon EKS, Whatwapp also uses a suite of AWS services to run its internal operations and improve the gaming experience for its players. For cost-effective storage, Whatwapp uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering scalability, data availability, security, and performance. For data ingestion, Whatwapp migrated to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a serverless streaming data service that makes it simple to capture, process, and store data streams at virtually any scale. Whatwapp uses Amazon CloudFront—a content delivery network service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience—to deliver content for its games. Developing its infrastructure on AWS has the added benefit of making Whatwapp more attractive to new DevOps talent, who prefer to work with updated, agile technology.

Figure 1: Whatwapp Architecture Diagram