Case Studies - Cloud Computing

An introduction to cloud computing right from the basics

What is cloud computing, in simple terms?

Cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing services -- from applications to storage and processing power -- typically over the internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis.

How does cloud computing work?

Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centers, companies can rent access to anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider.

One benefit of using cloud computing services is that firms can avoid the upfront cost and complexity of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and instead simply pay for what they use, when they use it.

In turn, providers of cloud computing services can benefit from significant economies of scale by delivering the same services to a wide range of customers.

What cloud computing services are available?

Cloud computing services cover a vast range of options now, from the basics of storage, networking, and processing power through to natural language processing and artificial intelligence as well as standard office applications. Pretty much any service that doesn't require you to be physically close to the computer hardware that you are using can now be delivered via the cloud.

What is public cloud?

Public cloud is the classic cloud computing model, where users can access a large pool of computing power over the internet (whether that is IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS). One of the significant benefits here is the ability to rapidly scale a service. The cloud computing suppliers have vast amounts of computing power, which they share out between a large number of customers -- the 'multi-tenant' architecture. Their huge scale means they have enough spare capacity that they can easily cope if any particular customer needs more resources, which is why it is often used for less-sensitive applications that demand a varying amount of resources.

What is private cloud?

Private cloud allows organizations to benefit from the some of the advantages of public cloud -- but without the concerns about relinquishing control over data and services, because it is tucked away behind the corporate firewall. Companies can control exactly where their data is being held and can build the infrastructure in a way they want -- largely for IaaS or PaaS projects -- to give developers access to a pool of computing power that scales on-demand without putting security at risk. However, that additional security comes at a cost, as few companies will have the scale of AWS, Microsoft or Google, which means they will not be able to create the same economies of scale. Still, for companies that require additional security, private cloud may be a useful stepping stone, helping them to understand cloud services or rebuild internal applications for the cloud, before shifting them into the public cloud.

What is hybrid cloud?

Hybrid cloud is perhaps where everyone is in reality: a bit of this, a bit of that. Some data in the public cloud, some projects in private cloud, multiple vendors and different levels of cloud usage. According to research by TechRepublic, the main reasons for choosing hybrid cloud include disaster recovery planning and the desire to avoid hardware costs when expanding their existing data center.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud platform offered by Amazon.com Inc (AMZN), has become a giant component of the e-commerce giant's business portfolio. In the first quarter of 2020, AWS brought in a record $10 billion of revenue, accounting for 13.5% of Amazon's total revenue. Having grown steadily in the 30-percent range the past few quarters, AWS is a frontrunner to other cloud computing platforms such as competitor Microsoft Azure.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• As the lead cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the primary profit driver for Amazon.
• In 2020, AWS broke the record of being a $10 billion business.
• Amazon controls more than a third of the cloud market, almost twice its next closest competitor.

What Is AWS Exactly?

AWS is made up of so many different cloud computing products and services. The highly profitable Amazon division provides servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security. AWS can be broken into three main products: EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service, Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service, and S3, Amazon’s storage system. AWS is so large and present in the computing world that it's far outpaced its competitors. As of February 2020, one independent analyst reports AWS has over a third of the market at 32.4%, with Azure following behind at half that amount 17.6%, and Google Cloud at 6%.

AWS has 76 availability zones in which its servers are located. These serviced regions are divided in order to allow users to set geographical limits on their services (if they so choose), but also to provide security by diversifying the physical locations in which data is held. Overall, AWS spans 245 countries and territories.

Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

Now let's discuss a successful case as a startup of Indian Gaming Company 

Gametion goes all-in on AWS and grows its daily active users by 350%, to hit 51 million

Founded in 2010, Gametion is a game development company based in Mumbai, India. With a team of seven full-time employees, the company started out making flash games for computer web browsers. As smartphones proliferated in India, Gametion started to see a dip in user traffic for their web browser games in 2013. Sensing untapped potential, Gametion seized the opportunity to pivot its business to mobile game development and launched several mobile games, including Ludo King in 2016. Ludo King, which is based on the board game Ludo, is a multiplayer game where players can choose to play either offline or online. Today, the mobile game has an average of 51 million daily active users (DAUs).

Challenges

In the year following Ludo King’s launch, and with the inclusion of the multiplayer feature that many users had been requesting for, the game had amassed an average of 50,000 concurrent users. As user numbers continued to rise, Gametion started to experience issues with managing its increased user traffic. With the third-party multiplayer networking engine (Platform as a Service Engine) that Gametion was running on, about three percent of all Ludo King matches created resulted in drop-offs. Additionally, the costs for maintaining its user base with an externally managed solution began to pile up. Amidst growing concerns of scalability, Gametion decided it was time to explore other solutions to address the challenges they were facing.

“The rapid growth of Ludo King took us all by surprise. We saw a jump in concurrent users from 50,000 to 85,000, over a couple of weeks. That was also when we started to see recurring game drop-offs with our existing engine. We realized that we needed to explore other solutions that could better cope with the surge in users,” says Vikash Jaiswal, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Gametion.

Making the Transition

Gametion saw the need to build an internal multiplayer backend system to manage its increasing user traffic more efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. The Gametion team approached Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Flentas Technologies—an AWS Partner Network Partner—to assist them in making this transition. Through this partnership, Gametion completed the migration from the third-party multiplayer engine onto its own multiplayer backend platform within four months.

“When we were brought in, Gametion was trying to move its existing player base from a third-party multiplayer engine to its own multiplayer backend that they had built on AWS. Back then, the main challenge was that it was not built with scaling in mind, and could not cope with the increased demand,” says Shohel Khatri, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder, Flentas Technologies. “We took an in-depth look at the existing architecture and came up with a complete re-design which took us three months to implement. The revamped architecture has the potential to scale infinitely in accordance with user demand,” continues Khatri.

With complete migration to AWS, Gametion was able to handle the continued rise in Ludo King’s popularity―even as it crossed the 250 million download mark in 2019, when it also started seeing 15 million DAUs.

Preparedness

In March 2020, when countries began to go into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gametion witnessed a sharper spike in user activity for Ludo King. It experienced two million downloads a day, bringing DAUs to 51 million—a three-fold increase from what it was at the end of 2019. With AWS infrastructure already in place, Gametion was well-equipped to handle the steep user growth.

“In a matter of weeks, we saw an increase in active users to nearly three times what we were seeing by the end of 2019. With the AWS infrastructure implemented, we were able to scale at speed to match this increase in traffic flow. We did start to see bottlenecks in our data storage software, but thanks to AWS, we had enough time to come up with a solution. We implemented Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka as a buffer, to lessen the burden on our data storage software,” says Clarence Pereira, Game Producer, Gametion.

Benefits and Future Plans

In under a decade, Gametion has grown from a seven-man team to a workforce of over 70 full-time employees. Ludo King has registered 475 million downloads to date, and with its current tech stack, Gametion is confident that it will be able to provide uninterrupted services to its user base.

“We are excited to have achieved this level of popularity with our customers, but as a startup, being able to maintain this success is just as critical. Thanks to Flentas and AWS, we are better informed about digital traffic management and how to efficiently manage our IT operations. They have been an extension of our own team throughout this process, and we are prepared to handle unexpected spikes that may arise in the future,” adds Jaiswal.

With its platform for game delivery and maintenance shored up, Gametion is looking to improve other aspects of the user experience for future games. By the end of 2020, Gametion intends to release three new games and plans to stay ahead of any potential challenges that may arise—such as data security—by considering new AWS services.

Benefits of AWS

• Scalable WebSockets across fleets of game servers based on player traffic
• Server-independent socket connections allowing distributed game sessions
• Microservices architecture for decreasing the blast radius of component failures
• Reduced user drop-offs by 99.99%

AWS Services Used By Gametion

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.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a blazing fast in-memory data store that provides sub-millisecond latency to power internet-scale real-time applications. Built on open-source Redis and compatible with the Redis APIs, ElastiCache for Redis works with your Redis clients and uses the open Redis data format to store your data. Your self-managed Redis applications can work seamlessly with ElastiCache for Redis without any code changes.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront is integrated with AWS – both physical locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as other AWS services.

Amazon MSK

Amazon MSK is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Apache Kafka is an open-source platform for building real-time streaming data pipelines and applications. With Amazon MSK, you can use native Apache Kafka APIs to populate data lakes, stream changes to and from databases, and power machine learning and analytics applications.

Amazon Cloudwatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.

Let's hear from the Founder and CEO of Gametion, What he thought about AWS

"We are excited to have achieved this level of popularity with our customers, but as a startup, being able to maintain this success is just as critical. Thanks to Flentas and AWS, we are better informed about digital traffic management and how to efficiently manage our IT operations. They have been an extension of our own team throughout this process, and we are prepared to handle unexpected spikes that may arise in the future."

Vikash Jaiswal

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Gametion

That's It...

Thanks To All For Reading This....