Playerzpot is India’s fast-growing fantasy gaming platform with users participating in online games such as cricket, football, and kabaddi. Playerzpot provides sports enthusiast with a platform to showcase their sports acumen by owning a team and by creating interactive activities to engage with similar fans. Fans can also create their own team made out of real-life players from upcoming matches, score points based on their on-field performances, and compete with other fans. In just a few steps, players compete and showcase their knowledge and win exclusive prizes on the platform. Playerzpot wants to cater to its customers by providing a gaming platform that delivers the highest level of customer experience. The company's priority is to give its players a great experience on the Playerzpot platform, especially during various sports seasons where there will be spikes in usage. It needed an agile and scalable cloud infrastructure to support its growing platform.

Online gaming has remained a popular trend in the video gaming industry for more than a decade and it is still evolving at rapid pace. Compared with offline games, online games are typically harder to maintain since the number of players fluctuates and can grow up to several millions per day. The successful implementation of online games requires an infrastructure that can scale out/up to support a concurrent connection of up to 1-5 million users during high peak loads – all while maintaining the high speed, high throughput traffic for a more enjoyable experience. One such challenge for developers is to cope with architecture challenges like limited bandwidth. Other challenges include maintaining security for all players and ensuring stable databases through constant management and monitoring.

Playerzpot tested multiple cloud Infrastructure platforms in its journey toward cloud adoption. It finally chose Alibaba Cloud as the team was deeply engaged with Playerzpot throughout its evaluation process. In addition, Playerzpot found the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to be far more competitive with Alibaba Cloud, helping the company to keep the overall operational costs in check. Playerzpot leveraged the features of PolarDB as well as Alibaba Cloud's elastic scaling features (scale up or scale out) along with a scale-in option, which further reduced costs.

In Playerzpot’s architecture, users need to play either fantasy games or real games and need to be routed to different gaming servers accordingly via a load balancer (hosted on Alibaba Cloud ECS instances) to meet the user load demands. Alibaba Cloud Server Load Balancer can automatically scale the number of ECS instances based on the actual load and can redirect the user to the proper game server. Server Load Balancer is also configurable as per the number of concurrent users, and it is billed according to the number of connections defined, which offers additional cost savings to Playerzpot. When the user logs into the server, the session persists until the user logs out willingly or until the authorization token expires. While logged in, users would request the specific API of a game via the load balancer. All incoming requests are served via a cache layer powered by Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB for Redis, and to cope with the unpredictable loads, Playerzpot has deployed Alibaba Cloud PolarDB MySQL to scale out/up as per the type of load. When the load reduces, scale-in will be triggered. This greatly helped Playerzpot greatly reduce its operational costs. The load balancer also opens up with ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL for handling non-fantasy games. To increase the security of its cloud infrastructure, Playerzpot uses products like Resource Access Management (RAM) and VPC. Furthermore, Playerzpot maintains and monitors its databases with Alibaba Cloud Database Management Service (DMS).

Playerzpot hopes to further improve its cloud security and efficiency by combining DMS with the Database Autonomy Service (DAS) by Alibaba Cloud.