Behind the Scenes with the Dragon Ball Legends GCP Back End

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Behind-the-scenes-with-the-Dragon-Ball-Legends-GCP-backend.html

by luord • 8 years ago

118 32 8 years ago

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

ageyfman• 8 years ago

great case study!

thelastidiot3• 8 years ago

Case study my arse. Just reads like an ad pamphlet.

yeukhon• 8 years ago

If you are giving such cold comment, you might as well spell the word “ass”, which seems colder than the British’s arse.

eitally• 8 years ago

Disclosure: I work on GCP, opinions are my own.

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.

a012• 8 years ago

I read it as a marketing for Google Spanner.

defenestration• 8 years ago

Would feel more honest and less like an ad, if they also mention the trade-offs and struggles.

thelastidiot3• 8 years ago

Right on. You caught exactly what was missing from this non-objective article. Pure Kool-aid. No pitfalls.

theDoug• 8 years ago

A few trade-offs that required this setup are mentioned. Transparency is often difficult, and never satisfactory to all.

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.

AlimJaffer• 8 years ago

I'm not surprised they went with GCP. We've built backend services for games on AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. and their network is the best suited for realtime games as it stands from our experience. Unfortunately not had any real experience with Cloud Spanner as we didn't want to tie our technology directly to GCP.

thelastidiot3• 8 years ago

Kudos for deciding not to adopt a proprietary solution on public cloud.

CreepGin2• 8 years ago

Did you experience a better overall network performance using GCP? I'm also in the process of choosing a cloud provider for a realtime networked game. Am going with AWS because GCP doesn't currently have Hongkong and Seoul.

thesandlord• 8 years ago

We are launching a Hong Kong region soon: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/11/coming-in-2018-...

(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!

rblatz• 8 years ago

Interesting, I would have assumed azure would be good for that. Seeing as Xbox live runs on azure.

Thaxll• 8 years ago

How so? The biggest online game are running on AWS and I'm sure they're doing fine. ( Fortnite, Overwatch ect ... )

jayd164• 8 years ago

That's not big at all. Those are what, 4-12 players at a time? Everything can run within a single server so all the IO is to the users.

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.

memonkey• 8 years ago

Cool!

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).

neilsimp1• 8 years ago

Please do a Show HN or something similar when you're done with this, I'd love to see it.

kingbirdy• 8 years ago

That sounds ridiculous and I'd love to see it on the front page of HN when you're done

hueving• 8 years ago

This is an ad.

Crash0v3rid3• 8 years ago

So what? How do you prefer ads about Cloud technology? Just a list of what products and features are offered? This at least gives us a real world example of how someone uses these products.

Uberphallus• 8 years ago

Dragon Ball Legends is my go to game for the toilet these days, and it's funny they advertise the Google network, since the PvP experience is very sub par. Half of the time I can't connect with the opponent, and if you check the DBL subreddit, I'm not the only one.

Svoka• 8 years ago

Pokemon Go used GCP as well, and was a disaster when launched (from service availability point of view). It was down more than not, hours of outages.

forgot-my-pw• 8 years ago

I think Google Spanner wasn't available yet that time. They chose GCP for the container support / Kubernetes.

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.

Behind the Scenes with the Dragon Ball Legends GCP Back End

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