Behind the Scenes with the Dragon Ball Legends GCP Back End
cloudplatform.googleblog.com
cloudplatform.googleblog.com
(I work for GCP)
The GCP network is one of the crown jewels of the platform that a lot of people take for granted. I'd definitely test it out!
I haven't played this DBZ game but if its more of an MMO with a live view of all the players in your area you might be dealing with user handoff between servers, cross server communication etc etc.
[1] https://gamerant.com/fortnite-concurrent-player-record-playe...
Yes but those are all shardable, cacheable and mostly asynchronous. The blog post is about how you can build a large world wide game as if it was a single data center with low latency.
I'm actually in the process of creating a presentation on Programming Concept Analogies for Dragon Ball Z fans (ex. variables and capsules; polymorphism and super saiyan levels).
There's an interesting talk about this by Niantic Director of Engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6ARungTOL4
Timestamp for the part about the launch: https://youtu.be/j6ARungTOL4?t=1249
TLDW: Niantic made a prediction on the server load, provisioned 5x of that, and only planned to Beta release in Australia & NZ, but everyone ended up sharing the APK worldwide. The first few weeks of traffic ended up being 50x the initial estimate. Niantic also found some scaling bugs in the game that were fixed in the first weeks. Pokemon Go reached the number of Twitter daily user within 2 days.
The next version of Pokemon Go could really benefit from Spanner if they haven't used it already.
Case studies are a form of advertising -- so what? They're much more effective in qualifying a technology or service provider in a given area than a web page with a feature list. If you were looking for an engineering blog, you came to the wrong place, or had inappropriate expectations.
The macro level point this blog post articulates is that GCP has now been successfully used, spanning multiple years, using varying architectures, by enough gaming companies (even just counting Niantic, Nintendo & Bandai-Namco, not to mention Epic, EA & Ubisoft) for it to be considered a tier 1 provider.
Additionally, if you compare apples to apples, take a look at this recent Microsoft gaming case study ( https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/ubisoft-media-te... ) and tell me which you think paints the cloud provider in a more positive & compelling light.
I'll close with this: if you want to use a FOSS stack for your stuff, fine, have at it. You can even rent servers via GCE and host there... or literally anywhere else. But there are a few critical differences between GCP and AWS or Azure. Setting aside the network quality & performance, which is objectively superior with Google, outside of GCE almost every other GCP product is offered as a managed service. Beyond that, there are several -- like Spanner -- that don't exist anywhere else. I fully appreciate a desire to avoid vendor lock-in, but there are plenty of situations where allying with a vendor that offers a superior product/service for your specific business need is absolutely the correct decision.
I'll also note that Google is overall extremely good about open sourcing things -- like Kubernetes, Apache Beam & Tensorflow -- it creates and offers as managed services within GCP.
You'll never hear me claim GCP is the best cloud for everything or everyone, but I take umbrage with potshots like this. All it does is cause irritation and muddy the waters for people trying to figure out what tech is right for them.
Anyway, impressive work making such a great set of services available.
If you really know what you're doing you can get moderately close to the same stack, but of course you won't get the same network, etc.
As someone who works on the marketing team, I'm pleasantly surprised that even this much was allowed to be shared- it's pretty rare that we share customer architecture diagrams, let alone into a blog post.