About the Project

Realm (https://realm.art) is a young Web3 gaming company, whose main product is an open-world multiplayer game.
In 2021 the company came to OpsWorks Co. with a request to help them create a proof of concept infrastructure in AWS. After successfully testing the PoC, full-size production and staging environments were given the green light. We at OpsWorks Co. developed a solution that follows all six pillars of the AWS Well-Architectured framework: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost-optimization, and sustainability.

Goals of the Project

Create a scalable and cost-efficient infrastructure for the Web3 multiplayer game in AWS.

Challenge

The main company’s application was ready to be released for beta testing. In order to achieve our goal of creating a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure, we decided to follow the AWS Well-Architectured framework. The main concern was the availability of the application and its components. That’s why the team decided to use AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service that out of the box ensures high availability, cost efficiency and has built-in mechanisms for blue-green deployments and roll-backs. To increase the availability of the application, in addition to the standard solution of having more than one replica, we configured a Horizontal POD auto scaler and cluster auto scaler which, working together, allow the application to scale depending on the load. The resulting infrastructure we built is able to serve virtually any quantity of users.

Why AWS?

Choosing AWS as a cloud provider that can meet all of a company’s needs seems to be the most sensible solution for a variety of reasons. The wide selection of regions where AWS is present was one of the reasons. The company's employees are located in several different countries, and in addition, the multiplayer game is available worldwide. Migrating to AWS allowed the team to ensure quick and secure service from anywhere in the world. All of the services used to build the infrastructure are secure, highly available, and easy to maintain. The simplicity and the highly beneficial cooperation conditions with AWS were vital when choosing a cloud provider. One more critical factor is that many AWS services are compliant with different security standards by default. This allowed us to eliminate the need for a third-party server provider and cut cloud expenses threefold.

Benefits

We have managed to provide an opportunity for quick application scalability (within the current budget). This solution provides access to the game to a high number of users and does it both efficiently and securely.

Next steps

The current infrastructure is not at its final architecture version. During the next iterations, we are going to improve the security of the infrastructure and focus more on the improvements of the application’s Docker image, collect more business metrics from the application, and perform fine-tuning based on the feedback we’ve collected.