On the podcast this week, Stephanie Wong and Abdel Sghiouar are joined by guest Jan Harasym of Sharkmob Games, who starts the interview describing how he and his team designed the infrastructure for The Division. With the game’s sequel, The Division II, in development, Jan and his team made the decision to use a cloud provider. Jan describes the differences between on-prem and cloud, outlining the benefits of GCP for game development and hosting, including better reliability and development environments. Scaling a cloud project can be much more efficient, and Jan tells us some tricks for doing it well. We talk about the process of migrating this large game to Google Cloud and how they choose the software and development tools they used.

When Sharkmob migrated to the cloud, Jan worked to convince the company that GCP was the way to go. He tells us more about how he persuaded the team, how they planned the migration, and the overall success of the process. Sharkmob is working on two new projects for the future and soon will be releasing a new game, Vampire Masquerade Blood Hunt.

Jan Harasym

Jan has helped make online games work for eight years. Most recently, he helped release Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 with online infrastructure on top of GCP.

Cool things of the week

• New Tau VMs deliver leading price-performance for scale-out workloads blog
• Introducing container-native Cloud DNS: Global DNS for Kubernetes blog
• Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 site

Interview

• Sharkmob site
• The Division 1 site
• The Division 2 site
• Massive site
• Unreal site
• Zookeeper site
• Agones site
• Kubernetes site
• GKE site
• Blood Hunt site

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Abdel is working on GKE Network Recipes.