1. Web Game Conference 2013
Gabriel Glachant - Bulkypix

2. Bulkypix in a few numbers
 A 40 person company
 A catalog of over a 100 games and mobile applications
 15 million users
International publisher
Facebook and mobile platform
developper
Expert in mobile marketing, PR and
social networks

3. Online Game Challenges
Online platform requirements … and risks
 State of the art
 Business continuity
 Scalability
 Controlled costs
 Service disruption due to
 Server overload
 Datacenter failure
 Security issues
 Cheating
 Data theft
 All of those result in loss of
revenue and reputation

4. Initial Investment
Bulkypix requirements Traditional Server Platform
 Linux servers
 A turnkey MySQL DB
 Datacenter
 Hardware (servers, storage)
 Network (switches, routers,
load balancers)
 Security (firewalls)
 Bandwidth
 Systems & networks
administration !
 High initial investment (time
and money) !

5. Cloud Computing
 Linux servers: AWS EC2 (IaaS)
 Run pretty much any linux distro you want/need
 Snapshot servers anytime you want
 MySQL DB: AWS RDS (PaaS)
 Turnkey MySQL server (runs Oracle and MSSQL too)
 provision the CPU/storage that you need now
 increase CPU/storage later if necessary
 snapshots
 can be highly available (clusters !)

6. Hardware
MySQL Database
RDS
MySQL Database
Hardware
Web Server
EC2 Instance
Web Server
Client
AWS EC2
EC2 Availability Zone
AWS RDS

7. Business Continuity
Bulkypix requirements Traditional Server Platform
 Server failover
 Load balancing
 What happens when a
datacenter crashes ?
 Load balancers / failover
 Service Level Agreements
 Multiple Datacenters

8. High Availability
 AWS RDS – Multiple Availability Zones
 Standby Master
 Automatic Failover
 Transparent Snapshots (no service interruption)
 AWS EC2 – ELB (Elastic Load Balancing)
 Failover in case of server failure
 Load balancing !

9. RDS
MySQL Database
EC2 Instance
Web Server
Client
AWS EC2
EC2 Availability Zone
AWS RDS
EC2 Availability Zone
EC2 Instance
Web Server
RDS – Standby
MySQL Database
Client ELB
(Elastic
Load Balancer)

10. Featured on an App Store
Bulkypix requirements Traditional Server Platform
 Horizontal Scalability
 Vertical Scalability
 Increase number of servers
 Increase server size

11. Scaling
 AWS EC2 – Resize an EC2 instance
 Stop instance, resize instance, start instance.
 AWS EC2 - Autoscaling
 Automatically scale up when server load increases
 User experience stays the same
 No server drop out from ELB because of load saturation
 No server failure cascade
 Automatically scale down when load decreases
 Scales costs down

12. RDS
MySQL Database
EC2 Instances
Web Server
AWS EC2
EC2 Availability Zone
AWS RDS
EC2 Availability Zone
EC2 Instances
Web Server
RDS – Standby
MySQL Database
Client ELB
(Elastic
Load Balancer(
EC2 Autoscaling

13. Conclusion
 We’ve only covered very basics offered by cloud computing.
 Cloud computing has given Bulkypix
 inexpensive access to the big toys.
 high availability.
 high scalability.
 Learnings
 Costs management
 => Reserve instances or commit bandwidth for better rates.
 => Use autoscaling.
 Can be challenging when designing the software stacks.
 => Test and iterate.