General server side game development concepts, why it is hard, what to use as server etc.

1. Server Side
Game Development
is hard!

2. Too many front end platforms
-ios
-android
-browsers
-flash

3. Session is evil
-Can not scale

4. Long polling
-Socket programming
-Protocols
-Ups!

5. Database?
-Read/Write is small
-Not a good idea to use MySQL+Memcache
-NoSQL shines

6. Write your own server?
Not a good idea

7. Open Source alternatives
-Reddwarf Server (Project Darkstar)

9. Buy a good one?
-Smartfox Server
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/

10. Smartfox Server
The good
-Less code via listener based API
-Client API’s, no need for socket programming
-Stable
-Out of the box HTTP tunneling

11. Smartfox Server
The bad
-2500 Euro / server / year
-Not a Free Software

12. Smartfox Server
The Ugly
- Does not scale!

13. What others do?
Social Game
-Zynga
-King.com
-Wooga
MMO’s
-EA Games
-Blizzard

14. Wooga Open Source
- https://github.com/wooga Wooga Github
- Pocket Island - HTML5 game (Ruby, NodeJS)
https://github.com/wooga/Pocket-Island
- Lots of Ruby-Erlang-Redis-JS stuff
- Wooga SlideShare
http://www.slideshare.net/wooga

15. NoSQL is your friend
-Redis
-Memcache
-MongoDB
-Hazelcast
-CouchDB
-Riak
-Cassandra

16. Wooga
-Diamond Dash (4.6M DAU)
-Monster World
-Bubble Island
-Brain Buddies (LAMP)

17. LAMP
-Brain Buddies, Bubble Island
-Nginx instead of Apache
-MySQL is fast enough

18. Rails World
Monster World
- Started with Rails - MySQL
-Not so useful, Farming games are not arcade
games
-Switched to Redis, now it rocks!
Happy Hospital
-Rails - Redis cluster
-Fast enough but Redis is not RDB
-Redis problems as main DB

19. Magic Land
- No DB is faster than no DB
- S3, Erlang
- Erlang Workers, S3 used for records
- Stateful development is complex
- Open sourced most of the erlang stuff used
for this game in github
StateFul

20. Rails Again
Pearls Peril
- Rails, Redis (High score, Metadata, etc), Riak
(All other stuff)

21. Problems
Software is easy, data is hard
-Redis
No backup, No slave
-AWS
Fast to create instance, it fails sometimes, Slow
IO on EBS
-JRuby
Helps a lot as Concurrency libraries are great
for threading in Java World

22. Alternatives
Write your own server
- NodeJS
- Java NIO, Akka, Netty
- Erlang, Scala

23. Questions?