The cloud base escorts the perfect world to welcome the new era of the industry

Light science fiction open world mobile game "Fantasy Tower" recently launched a new version of "Long Summer Flowing Firefly" and a new mimetic character "Tianlang". Since it was launched last year, it has been loved by many players and has become one of the self-research representative works of the perfect world's innovation category integration.

With its exquisite painting style, unique settings, and rich and diverse open world play methods, Fantasy Tower seems to be the best of the best. This is the representative of China's high-quality game industry, and also a strategic work of the perfect world for young people. Naturally, it needs to match the top infrastructure services.

Perfect World Games was the first to operate and maintain the game infrastructure by building its own IDC room. With the explosion of game and e-commerce users and the general trend of going to the cloud, Perfect World began its comprehensive cooperation with Alibaba Cloud: all new projects are on the cloud.

01 Go to the cloud in an all-round way and guarantee the operation of S-level games through the full link

Before "Fantasy Tower" was launched, Alibaba Cloud provided "S-level game service solution" for the perfect world's "War God Relics", "Fantasy New Killer" and other games. The so-called S-level game, the annual key game of the game company, belongs to the strategic level business developed and promoted with the strength of the whole company. The traffic expectation and technical requirements are the highest. "Fantasy Tower" is clearly listed here.

Alibaba Cloud provides full-link services for opening services of S-level games. First of all, Alibaba Cloud began to intervene in the final stage of the development of the S-level game in Perfect World, to understand the game types and the performance requirements of the product technology, to provide suggestions for the selection of cloud resources for Perfect World according to the existing solutions, and to provide services such as POC (Proof of Concept) and performance pressure testing of products, so that customers can better choose.

After the cloud resource selection stage is completed, the game officially enters the CB (Close Beta) stage of the game life cycle. This is the test before the official launch: invite players to experience, and further optimize the game after getting feedback from players. Some S-level games will carry out multiple rounds of CB tests, especially for big companies like Perfect World, which pay great attention to the quality of the game.

In the CB test phase, Alibaba Cloud Sync provided the architecture sorting service for the perfect world as the basis for subsequent resource support and communication. According to the game architecture diagram, Alibaba Cloud helps Perfect World to assess the basic resources and their risks, such as the number of concurrent connections for load balancing and the adequacy of QPS (Query Per Second). Alibaba Cloud provides a complete set of resource usage assessments to Perfect World, and provides Perfect World with a monitoring platform at the CB stage. The operation and maintenance team in the perfect world can see the performance and usage of all cloud resources on the monitoring system. When resources are in early warning, it can expand the capacity with one click on Alibaba Cloud.

After the CB stage, the game will enter the official release and online stage, also known as the OB (Open Beta) stage. The game products in OB stage can be downloaded by all players once they are online, so it is necessary to ensure the game experience when the player traffic increases sharply. Alibaba Cloud provides cloud resource allocation for S-level games to meet the demand of peak traffic for cloud resources. It also provides a complete risk assessment. From the bottom computer room to the host computer to the virtual machine, it carries out a complete resource inspection, sorts out the risks at all levels, and then helps the game companies avoid risks through the cloud's unique hot migration, hot upgrade and other operation and maintenance methods.

02 High-performance cloud computing power helps "Fantasy Tower" to provide smooth experience for players

With the development of technology and the characteristics of different projects, the cloud resource strategy of each project still needs to be constantly adjusted so that the perfect world can enjoy the most advanced and cutting-edge technical services at all times.

In order to give players the most fluent game experience and rapid expansion of infrastructure, "Fantasy Tower" chose to go online. As an online game with continuous iterative updates, the scale of computing power required for its operation will have periodic high concurrency with the launch of services, the launch of new versions, the launch of operational activities and other nodes. It has high requirements for the performance, stability, and multi-regional distribution of computing power.

As a large MMORPG online game, the interaction between players is an important part of the game. The maximum number of players online at the same time in a single zone is generally required to reach thousands, which has high requirements for the computing power of the game server. At the same time, it also has high requirements for I/O, because players in the same screen are required to see each other in real time in the game field of vision, a large number of players are online at the same time, and a large number of mobile packets and combat packets need to be broadcast in the field of vision. For S-level games, there are complex resource requirements, large demand, rapid expansion and stability.

Alibaba Cloud provides full-process technical services in accordance with the service process of opening services for S-level games. Alibaba Cloud team joined at the end of the research and development of Fantasy Tower, evaluated the situation of the game with the Perfect World game team, and recommended the seventh generation cloud server ECS equipped with Intel's third generation Xeon processor (code: Ice Lake), which relies on the hardware acceleration of DPCA architecture, has the current industry-leading CPU computing power, adopts the domestic leading 50G network architecture, and has reached 24 million PPS super forwarding capability 600000 storage IOPS and ultra-low network storage latency provide stable and predictable ultra-high performance. At the same time, Perfect World further improves the data compression performance and decompression performance by calling Intel ISA-L, which is open source of Intel, and using the AVX-512 advanced instruction set unique to Intel CPU.

"Fantasy Tower" is aimed at game players all over the world, and the game itself has high latency requirements, and needs to be deployed locally as much as possible. Alibaba Cloud infrastructure has now been deployed on four continents around the world, with 25 public cloud regions and 80 availability zones, which can meet the needs of perfect multi-domain deployment.

03 Pioneer the thermal migration capability to escort "Fantasy Tower" and strive for continuous business line

In addition to high performance and low latency, the game business is most concerned about the availability and stability of the business. This affects whether the game service can be maintained at all times and the service of players can be guaranteed to the maximum extent.

For DDos attacks, Alibaba Cloud provides a "cloud native+advanced anti-IP security" solution for the perfect world: when there is no attack, the traffic goes to the cloud native computer room to ensure the low latency access experience of players; After being attacked by reaching the defense threshold, the traffic will be switched to the high defense computer room, which can reach the terabyte "unlimited shoulder" security scheme. Although the player experience is slightly affected, it is guaranteed that the business will not be affected.

In response to the demand for high availability of services, Alibaba Cloud and Perfect World have further developed new technical solutions related to "hot migration function and stability", that is, switching between traffic and services within Alibaba Cloud ECS elastic computing to ensure that players are not physically aware.

First of all, Alibaba Cloud ECS background will regularly run the schedule hardware scan and software detection based on AI model to eliminate potential hardware and software faults, and conduct early warning and scheduling for faults, so as to find and solve them in time.

Secondly, relying on Alibaba Cloud's strong supply chain and resource market capabilities, the underlying resources will be highly dispersed, divided according to business importance, and core business and non-core business will be differentiated to minimize business losses caused by single point of failure.

Finally, through the lossless migration capability, the failed ECS will be migrated to a healthy host computer to prevent business interruption. In the "Fantasy Tower" project, Alibaba Cloud has adopted the lossless migration capability of 1T large memory, which is the first in the industry, to ensure the uninterrupted service of large game servers.

"Fantasy Tower" was officially launched in China as early as December 15, 2021. It has been 8 months since. Alibaba Cloud has always provided the perfect world with ultra-powerful computing power, ultra-low latency and ultra-high I/O services. It not only carries high-concurrency requests at the front end of the Magic Tower, but also ensures the high availability, high performance and high flexibility of the business. With the support of the overall high computing performance, the cost performance of the "Fantasy Tower" project has increased by 30%.

The cooperation between Perfect World and Alibaba Cloud is not only limited to Fantasy Tower, but also continues to deepen. The cloud strategy of the perfect world is not an exception. Refinement and globalization are the inevitable trend of the current game industry. In the new era of the industry, the infrastructure servers and convenient and efficient technical services deployed globally by cloud computing are ready for development at the right time. In the future, Alibaba Cloud will work with more enterprises to embrace new technologies, innovate rapidly and move towards a new era.