Yamisok Plays to Win by Running Nationwide Gaming Events Concurrently on AWS

Mobile gaming is more than a pastime in Indonesia. In August 2020, the national government recognized esports as an official sport and organizes nationwide esports tournaments to promote gaming as a driver of economic growth, engaging companies such as Yamisok to run these tournaments. With 350,000 registered players, Yamisok is striving to become the top esports destination in Indonesia through its online gaming platform and mobile app. Event organizers such as media firms also engage Yamisok to run esports tournaments.

Yamisok launched in 2018 on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. As a startup, it adopted a vertical scaling approach to increase server capacity on its platform during large tournaments, with a small team responsible for deploying and monitoring its application. However, as the company began to grow rapidly, it became increasingly difficult to keep up with the demand for more tournaments. Peak gaming time occurs after Yamisok’s business hours, which caused its deployment engineers to work around the clock.

To address this issue, the startup implemented Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling and adopted Amazon CloudWatch to automate monitoring. “Auto Scaling has been a big success. We’ve had no service downtimes or lags since implementation and can accommodate about 3,000 concurrent users per second,” says Subangkit Ramadiputra, chief technology officer at Yamisok.

After implementing Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Yamisok held an online game tournament with 15,000 registrations, the highest it has ever achieved in a single day. The platform’s proven stability also continues to attract new customers and keeps government and high-profile media clients coming back.

Yamisok has since steadily increased its revenues per tournament due to increased user traffic and confidence from event organizers. “Our regular B2B customers have a great deal of trust in us, which gives them the confidence to run both small and major tournaments smoothly on Yamisok,” Subangkit Ramadiputra says.

Many of the games available to Yamisok’s user community are free to play, an aspect that continues to draw new users to the platform. Because of this, the business needs to minimize its costs and does so by using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, saving 50 to 60 percent on computing costs compared to Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances.

“Our experience with AWS has been positive: security, stability, and low costs are all part of the package,” Subangkit Ramadiputra says.

The diagram below illustrates the AWS infrastructure at Yamisok:

To learn more, visit AWS Game Tech.