Modern Game Server Infrastructure in the Cloud

Video

About the Talk

Building large-scale infrastructure for a multiplayer game is not an easy feat. Game servers are stateful applications with long-lived connections to its clients, the opposite of what modern highly scalable server applications tend to be, so most of the tools and techniques used for deploying and maintaining these services on the cloud are not useful.

Diego Rocha, Software Engineering Manager at Playkids, will discuss how a small team at PlayKids, an educational games platform, leveraged DigitalOcean, Kubernetes, and Agones to build PlayKids’ infrastructure to reliably serve millions of players. The presented solution enables multi-data center deployments and game server updates without disrupting game sessions, all at a low cost and requiring almost no maintenance.

What You’ll Learn

• How to deploy and scale large-scale game servers in the cloud to boost development productivity, reduce maintenance, and improve your game’s quality and resilience.
• How to decrease the high cost of network-intensive multiplayer games through infrastructure optimization using DigitalOcean.

This Talk is Designed For

• Multiplayer game developers on small teams
• Backend developers interested in scalability
• Anyone who wants to learn how to host applications that are stateful, network-intensive, and/or have sticky connections.

Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of the value and difficulties of deploying large-scale game servers.
• Moderate familiarity with cloud technologies.

About the Presenters

Diego Rocha leads a team of backend engineers at PlayKids. Although he considers himself a generalist, he’s been building critical large-scale distributed systems for more than 7 years. As a computer scientist, he thrives in applying theory and research to build solutions that are both elegant and efficient.

Fabian Barajas joined DigitalOcean in 2015 as a Customer Success Engineer and became a Solutions Engineer in early 2017. He is an LPIC-1 and SUSE Certified Linux Administrator, and holds a number of certifications, including ComTIA Linux+ and A+.