AWS re:Invent 2014

Broadridge Financial Solutions and Pitney Bowes have partnered to develop a new venture, Inlet, that enables brands across industries to deliver sensitive client communications (such as bills, statements, and tax documents) to the digital channels that consumers use every day, including online banking websites, social media, and cloud storage solutions. Inlet is built entirely on AWS, leveraging a broad range of AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, AWS IAM, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Direct Connect.

In this session, learn how building and running Inlet on AWS enabled Broadridge to deliver an innovative new solution for sensitive content delivery to the market in a very short period of time. Robert Krugman, SVP Digital Strategy, discusses Inlet's service architecture and the competitive advantages and cost benefits of deploying on AWS.

Jason Timmes led the migration of the primary data warehouse for Nasdaq's Transaction Services U.S. business unit (which operates Nasdaq's U.S. equity and options exchanges) from a traditional on-premises MPP database to Amazon Redshift. The project significantly reduced operational expenses. Jason, who is an Associate Vice President of Software Development at Nasdaq, describes how his team migrated a warehouse that loads approximately 7 billion rows a day into the cloud, satisfied several security and regulatory audits, optimized read and write performance, ensures high availability, and orchestrates other back-office activities that depend on the warehouse daily loads completing. Along with sharing several technical lessons learned, Jason will discuss Nasdaq's roadmap to integrating Redshift with more AWS services, as well as with more Nasdaq products, to offer even greater benefit to clients (internal and external) in the months ahead.

In this session, AWS shares best practices for mobile, console, and MMO games that can scale from 1,000 to 1,000,000 users. See how to create a game backend using Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Learn about database scaling challenges, and how to use Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon ElastiCache to address them. And, hear how to deliver game assets efficiently using Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. Then, hear from Roope Kangas, Lead Server Developer and co-founder at Grand Cru, about their journey launching and cost-optimizing Supernauts on AWS. Grand Cru used load testing to validate their system before launch, enabling them to reach 1 million users in 6 days. Then, after launch, the team optimized their architecture based on system metrics to cut their AWS costs by more than half.

Success in free-to-play gaming requires knowing what your players love most. The faster you can respond to players' behavior, the better your chances of success. Learn how mobile game company GREE, with over 150 million users worldwide, built a real-time analytics pipeline for their games using Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB. They walk through their analytics architecture, the choices they made, the challenges they overcame, and the benefits they gained. Also hear how GREE migrated to the new system while keeping their games running and collecting metrics.

How do you really architect a game that can handle 5, 6, or 7 million daily active users? Learn about the scalability challenges that EA had to overcome for The Simpsons: Tapped Out. Hear how EA had to redesign their MySQL-based database layer on the fly, migrating over to Amazon DynamoDB, while keeping the game running. See how EA added AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Auto Scaling to simplify their deployments, while also lowering costs by enabling them to respond to changing player counts. EA shows how they switched from sticky sessions to Amazon ElastiCache, solving player disconnects and allowing further scaling out. Finally, EA shares some interesting statistics about The Simpsons: Tapped Out, as well as their overall learnings about how best to develop, deploy, and monitor a game on AWS.

In this session, we go beyond online game servers, to explore other areas where AWS can benefit your game. First, we dive into using AWS to perform load testing of your game. We present architecture patterns, what makes a good load test, and real-world example scenarios. We then highlight emerging trends with cloud rendering, and show how you can integrate Amazon EC2 GPU-based instances into your game workflow. Finally, hear from Playcast, who brought their Cloud Gaming service to new players worldwide, by leveraging the G2 EC2 instance. Playcast share how they architected their streaming service to best leverage the cloud, things they learned, and demo their service streaming games from AWS.

Riot Games is a high-paced dynamic environment with many groups striving to release new content, features, and tools. Riot runs League of Legends, one of the biggest online multiplayer games, and uses AWS to host many complex sites that service millions of players everyday. In this session, Riot Games talks about the evolution of their management practice on AWS over the past two years, some lessons learned the hard way, and where they hope to be in the future. Key topics include:

SSO (Single-Sign On) integration with IAM roles

High-level AWS architecture (How to make it easy on your organization)

VPC design, centralization, and simplification

DevOps tooling and automation

How and why we use Auto Scaling

This is a deep-dive straight into the guts of running a low-latency multiplayer game, such as a first-person shooter, on a global scale. We dive into architectures that enable you to split apart your back-end APIs from your game servers, and Auto Scale them independently. See how to run game servers in multiple AWS regions such as China and Frankfurt, and integrate them with your central game stack. We'll even demo this in action, using AWS CloudFormation and Chef to deploy Unreal Engine game servers. In the second half, hear from PlayFab, who built the backend for the Top-10 free-to-play PC shooter Loadout. PlayFab reveals details about their architecture, including AWS Elastic Beanstalk setup, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon RDS patterns, data sharding, and use of multiple Availability Zones. Finally, PlayFab highlights challenges they faced when deploying to AWS China, and how they solved them.

How do you deploy a game with millions of online users, playing across the globe, without interrupting their experience? Learn how Scopely uses AWS automation tools to build, deploy, and manage highly-scalable mobile games. They show how to use AWS CloudFormation and Ansible to build andquot;golden AMIs.andquot; See how they do green/blue deployment of those AMIs using Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, to avoid kicking players offline. Then, hear how they leverage Amazon Kinesis, ElasticSearch, and Amazon SNS to create a unified monitoring and alerting infrastructure for your games. Finally, learn how Scopely use Amazon VPC and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to keep your scalable gaming infrastructure safe and secure.

What if you could deliver a console-quality gaming experience to mobile devices anywhere in the world? In this session, learn about Amazon AppStream and how it enables real-time app streaming as a service via a few SDK calls. Hear how CCP has designed a new initial experience for their massive multiplayer game, EVE Online, that streams their character creator from the cloud, while the game downloads in the background, increasing conversions. We look at how Amazon Game Studios is developing hybrid games that run half on the tablet, half in the cloud, enabling console-quality graphics on mobile devices.