BIGBANG: Affordable Cloud Solution for Game Application -Alibaba Cloud Study Case

Gaming

Asia Pacific

SME/Startup

"The big clincher was the cost and support system. The base cost was low, and one-month subscription was in place, so it was convenient to use and effective. It was also great that I was able to ask questions directly to the person in charge via DingTalk when I didn't understand anything at the beginning."

- Rei Yamashita

Director CTO, BIGBANG Inc.

About
BIGBANG

BIGBANG Inc. is a video game app production company responsible for the "Sengoku Chronicles" franchise. The company was founded by Mr. Kitagawa and Mr. Aihara, the current President, and Vice President, respectively. They created the company with a vision of "creating services that people around the world enjoy using in their daily lives.” Currently, the company has 25 employees with top-notch video game backgrounds from companies such as Konami and DeNA.

Challenge

"Lost Crusade 2" is one of the games that BIGBANG Inc. created and currently operates. The high cost of using and managing cloud products troubled the operating members.

"I felt the server/infrastructure costs were high compared to the framework. In addition, since many parts required manual management and the framework was old, we were waiting for an opportunity to have another look at them”, Director CTO Rei Yamashita says.

She was also concerned about whether the cloud products and solutions were easy to use. She hoped all products could be built on a framework that is often used in general systems, making the product and solution framework easier for engineers to use.

Why
Alibaba Cloud

Empowered by Alibaba Cloud, BIGBANG performed a seamless dynamic migration from the previous cloud environment, built a test environment in about 15 days, migrated their production environment in one month, and achieved a 40% reduction in cloud infrastructure operating costs.

Architecture

BIGBANG Uses DTS and SMC to Support Smooth Dynamic Migration of "Lost Crusade 2."

When migrating "Lost Crusade 2", BIGBANG Inc. used the "Data Transmission Service (DTS)" and "Server Migration Center (SMC)" in Alibaba Cloud. By selecting Alibaba Cloud as the migration destination, the company was able to migrate to it dynamically while "Lost Crusade 2" continued running.

"Data was constantly changing since the services were up, and I felt we needed to take more than a day for maintenance to transfer all the data after they were stopped. We also considered a method to transfer a certain amount in advance and the rest during maintenance, but it was difficult to extract the difference. However, since dynamic migration became possible with DTS and SMC, services were migrated with the shortest downtime for switching DNS and checking operations." Ms. Yamashita says.

The company used DTS and SMC. They also built the test environment in 15 days, which included verification. They built the production environment in one month.

Alibaba Cloud Supports "Lost Crusade 2" Infrastructure

"Many batches used CLI to control cloud functions. With "OpenAPI Explorer (OAE), I was able to quickly find the appropriate API and parameters for running on the Alibaba Cloud side", says Ms. Yamashita. OAE is a web-based API calling tool. OAE can automatically call the SDK sample in accordance with the API request and smoothly build an application that uses the Alibaba Cloud SDK.

For example, cloud resource is usually managed from the GUI screen of the console. When using OAE, one can automate infrastructure construction, scaling the number of servers, and changing server configurations. It's also possible to save ECS server logs regularly, helping to reduce the workload of operation management.

Automatic processing, such as storing the image file uploaded by the user in a predetermined folder, can also be performed. It can be applied to various things and can respond flexibly case by case.

"Lost Crusade 2" services have been running stably after migration since it uses the same high-speed, highly available, and highly secure infrastructure that e-commerce site "Tmall.com” and e-wallet app Alipay uses. The company also uses our general products, such as ECS, SLB, OSS, and CDN, and operates by making full use of Alibaba Cloud services.

By combining these services, we provided "Lost Crusade 2" with a high-performance and highly efficient environment.

"Virtual servers always tend to have performance that lags a few steps behind the catalog specifications, but I have the impression that they are performing well." Ms. Yamashita says.

In addition, operational cost management has improved compared to before migration. Since Alibaba Cloud dynamically updates the cost display each time a service is purchased, it is easy to understand how much you are currently spending on cloud resources. BIGBANG has succeeded in reducing the system operation cost of "Lost Crusade 2" by 40% by using Alibaba Cloud to thoroughly manage costs.

Looking Forward

In the future, BIGBANG plans to use a security solution to make their system more secure. To achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in the market, Alibaba Cloud will continue to walk together with BIGBANG.

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