1. Dedicated Servers vs the "Cloud“:
Pros and Cons when building and operating
Gaming Services
Christof Wegmann, Founder Exit Games

2. Photon in a Nutshell
• Socket Server and Framework
• Realtime, Multiplayer, Cross Platform
• 20,000 developers (Indies and AAA)

3. Photon compared to „Social SDKs“
• Leaderboards • Matchmaking
• Challenges • Realtime Gameplay
• Achievements
• Social Network Integr. • „Unlimited“ scale
• News, Push • Low Latency / local Presence
• Gamestatesync • Properties
• Payment • Interest Groups
• Downloadable Content • Remote Authentication
• Virtualgoods/-currency • Counters
• (Usually) Cross platform • Cross Platform!!!

4. Unity Rules
• But we do more ...

5. You build an MMOG – really?
• Room based games (2-32 players)
– FPS, Racer, Casual Game
– Broadcast of Messages to all Players
– U4ia: Offensive Combat, Codemasters: F1 Online
• MMO games
– Hundreds of People per Map/World/Region
– Interest Management
– Innogames: Kartuga, FOX: Family Guy Online

7. The Golden Thread
• What is it: Photon Cloud?
• Design Goals & Requirements
• Battle Cloud vs Dedicated
• Learnings and realworld data
• Summary

10. Design Goals of our Cloud
• Hosting
– „Unlimited“ scale
– Global hosting (US, EU, Asia)
• Ops (deploy, updates, manage, add)
– Manageable by a small team
• Architecture
– No persitence
– Failsafe (nodes can fail), Self Healing

11. Cloud vs Dedicated: Features
Cloud/VMs Dedicated/Iron
Ramp up ++ „Instant“ - 1-3 days
Ramp down ++ „Instant“ - Monthly
Snapshots ++ Yes. - 3rd party
Automation ++ Rightscale, OpsCode + Manual, Scripts
Power/CCU + „Weak“ Socket ++ Better „bang“ for
performance the „buck“.
Services (Saas) ++ DB, MsgQueues, + Backup
Storage, Backup

12. Understand your Load
• Scenario
– 25 rooms x 16 players = 400 CCU
– 2 x 50 bytes reliable / s, 10 x 50 bytes unreliable / s
• Server: Quad-Core, 8GB RAM, Win7 x64
– In: 4,500 msg/s (1,2 MB/s)
– Out: 65,000 msg/s (7.5 MB/s)
– CPU: ~30%
– NIC (100Mbit): 80% saturated
– Client RTT: ~40ms

13. CCU is Overestimated
• Optimistic rule of thumb:
1,000,000 downloads
500k : MAU (50% of downloads)
50k : DAU (10% of MAU)
5k : CCU (10% of DAU)
• Real World Sample: Online Mobile Shooter
– 4,000,000 DL : 3,000 CCU

14. Traffic is Underestimated
• Traffic for 1,000 CCU
• 8MB/s (saturated 100Mbit NIC)
• 8TB/month (8 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 * 40%)

15. Cloud vs Dedicated: Price
• Price (ballpark)
Amazon EC2 LeaseWeb
Server $250 $150
Traffic (per TB) $150 $20
(5TB included)
• Sample calculation for 15,000 CCU
Amazon EC2 LeaseWeb
10 Servers $2,500 $1,500
40TB traffic $6,000 (included)
= =
$8,500 $1,500

16. Hybrid: Best of Both Worlds

17. Global Presence is Key

18. Real World: Our own Cloud
• Largest game has 21,000 CCUs
• 1,200,000 msg/s (req, resp, ev)
• 150 TB per month traffic
• 50 Servers
• US, Europe & Asia
• Our „perfect“ Box
– Single CPU, 4 Cores, 4GB RAM, 5TB traffic

19. Cloud is Trend, Focus is Trend
• Storage: Cloudant
• Social API: Roar Engine, Scoreloop
• Realtime: Photon
• Ad: Playhaven
• Notification: Urban Airship
• Analytics: GA, Honey Tracks, Flurry, Kotagent
• Mix with your own!

20. Questions?
Now or later at the LeaseWeb booth.