Moongfrog

Moonfrog Cuts Compute Costs by 40 Percent with AWS Graviton

Moonfrog Labs specializes in mobile games integrating real-time social interaction. Its range of multi-player games offers a premium gaming experience that attracts about 15 million daily active users across India and globally.
 
With the pandemic lockdown, Moonfrog’s active user base expanded by more than 100 percent in 2020, triggering its need to modernize and cost optimize its game platforms to capture and retain its growing user base. To maintain a high-quality user gaming experience, Moonfrog runs 15% percent of its cloud workloads on AWS Graviton processors.
 
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“While user experience is our top priority, being able to keep costs lean with AWS Graviton gives us greater scope to experiment faster, and more extensively, with new features that contribute to a smoother and more enjoyable gameplay. Our IT team becoming more experimental also improves our chances of success in this competitive industry.”

Guruprasad GV
Architect, Moonfrog

Enabling Performance and Innovation with AWS Graviton

Moonfrog’s engagement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) dates back to August 2013, when it built its IT infrastructure on the AWS Cloud for reliability, ease of service management, and good technical support from AWS.
 
In December 2020, Moonfrog began to migrate its workloads, such as user services and subscriber systems, to AWS Graviton instances to achieve the best possible price performance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
 
The migration was successfully completed in March 2021 without disruption to user experience or delay to its development pipeline. Moonfrog realized an overall 40 percent better price performance after the migration, despite running the same workloads.
 
Guruprasad GV, architect at Moonfrog, explains how cost competitiveness equips Moonfrog to continue innovating and improving user experience while staying competitive in India’s thriving online gaming industry.
 
“While user experience is our top priority, being able to keep costs lean with AWS Graviton gives us greater scope to experiment faster, and more extensively, with new features that contribute to a smoother and more enjoyable gameplay. Our IT team becoming more experimental also improves our chances of success in this competitive industry,” says GV.

Powering High-quality Gameplay Across the Board

Serving close to a million active players at any time, Moonfrog strives to ensure a good gaming experience, even for users with poor connectivity on low-end devices.
 
Moonfrog uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to automatically deploy, scale, and manage its containerized workloads and services in the AWS Cloud and uses Amazon CloudFront as its content delivery network service.
 
Elevating the user experience at Moonfrog also involves collecting accurate and reliable data to personalize gaming experiences tailored to each user’s device quality and connection speed.
 
To collect, securely store and access up to 4 TB of data per day, Moonfrog uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Moonfrog runs up to 50 billion user data points per day through Amazon Redshift for engagement analytics and game telemetry. With these AWS services, Moonfrog has easy access to a pipeline of real-time data to glean user insights to continuously improve user engagement and monetization of its games.
 
Moonfrog worked closely with AWS on a structured approach for seamless migration to AWS Graviton for its Linux-based workloads suitable for 64-bit ARM, such as Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis Clusters, Kafka Brokers, and Time-series databases. With these workloads on AWS Graviton instances, Moonfrog can gain up to 50 percent better price at its regional locations, and up to 30 percent performance improvement, compared to using the equivalent x86-Intel Amazon EC2 instances.
 
The collective combination of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for stateless workloads, and AWS Graviton for stateful workloads, have helped Moonfrog to optimize the cost and performance of its Amazon EC2 platform. Almost 50 percent of Moonfrog’s Amazon EC2 infrastructure currently runs on Spot Instances, saving up to 70 percent on Amazon EC2 costs. For further cost efficiency, Moonfrog deployed Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) gp3 volumes to achieve the best possible price performance for its game services.
 
 
 

Partnering to Scale New Heights

According to Neeraj Prem Verma, Lead DevOps engineer at Moonfrog, the collaboration with AWS has helped Moonfrog keep its architecture simple, so that its lean IT team can be more agile and focus on innovating better features rather than getting bogged down by operational issues.
 
Verma says, “Our experience with AWS has been great. They are customer-centric and have provided generous support and advice that helped simplify our adoption of AWS services. More importantly, we have the flexibility to continue building our existing infrastructure with additional complementary AWS services, which assures us that this partnership can support our long-term growth.”
 
This year, Moonfrog continues to plan to launch new gaming titles across different geographies on AWS Graviton. The company’s goal is to reach all mobile phone users in the Indian subcontinent and capture a larger market share among India’s 420 million - and growing - online gamers. With about half a billion digital payment users in India by 2022, Moonfrog also hopes to deliver new digital payment features to facilitate in-app purchases for its games as part of its growth strategy.

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About Moonfrog Labs

Moonfrog Labs, a gaming company launched in 2013, specializes in mass market social games with real-time social interaction. Its range of multiplayer games offer a premium gaming experience that attracts about 15 million daily active users globally, especially across the Indian subcontinent.

Benefits

  • 40 percent improvement in compute costs
  • Successfully executed migration in-house with no disruption to user experience or delay to development pipeline
  • Easy access to a pipeline of real-time data to continuously improve user engagement and monetization of games

AWS Services Used

AWS Graviton

AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2.

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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

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Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices.

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Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises.

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Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, using AWS-designed hardware and ML to deliver the best price performance at any scale.

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Amazon Simple Storage Service

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

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