Background information
Online gaming is becoming more and more popular in China, and game players have shown exponential growth. To compete in the market, game vendors need to ensure that their games are stable, secure and lag-free. More and more games have international users. This can make it hard for game vendors to provide a high-quality gameplay experience.
Alibaba Cloud DCDN adopts advanced technologies, such as separation of dynamic and static content, intelligent routing, IP Application Accelerator (IPA), and WebSocket protocol, to ensure high performance and high availability of the gaming industry.
Architecture
Alibaba Cloud DCDN helps game vendors build a fast, secure, and stable network environment, in which users can download and update games quickly, play global turn-based strategy games and real-time strategy games, and chat online. You can access DCDN without modifying the business logic.
Scenarios
Game downloads and updates
Requirements: Slow downloads of installation packages and high bandwidth usage caused by the ever-increasing game installation sizes, frequent version updates, and the surge in downloads are pain points in the online gaming industry.
Benefits: With more than 3,200 points of presence (POPs) around the world, Alibaba Cloud DCDN allows users to download game installation packages from the nearest POPs instead of the origin server. Files can be cached on POPs to process high concurrent requests and improve the download speed of games.
Cloud game acceleration
Requirements: Cloud computing-based games require customization for transmission protocols and numerous data transfers between clients and the origin server. It is difficult for an origin server to cover all regions and ensure a high-quality gameplay experience.
Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN uses IPA based on the TCP and UDP underlying transmission protocols to build distributed POPs nationwide. This helps cloud game vendors build high-speed transmission links between clients and the origin server to improve the gaming experience. What is IP Application Accelerator?
Globalization of games
Requirements: The global game market is experiencing explosive growth. If game vendors can break into the international market, they can make large profits. However, the network environment of cross-border transmission is complex and problems such as high latency, unstable links, and frequent disconnections hinder the globalization of games. Game vendors require high-quality gameplay experience and distribution of downloadable resources to develop the international market.
Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN deploys more than 3,200 POPs around the world. Game vendors can use simple configurations to have global POP coverage to meet the network access requirements of global players, and build a fast, reliable, intelligent, and secure high-speed channel for the globalization of games.
Game security
Requirements: The gaming industry is prone to attacks. Website hijacking, account theft, and malicious attacks affect the user experience, and can cause service interruption.
Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN builds a comprehensive security system on POPs. DCDN provides full-link HTTPS secure transmission and defends against web application attacks, hotlinking, and tampering.
Website or app acceleration
Requirements: Gaming websites and apps consist of dynamic and static content, such as images, API requests, and videos. Page freezing and network congestion caused by demand spikes may result in the loss of a large number of users. Effective handling of high traffic loads and 24/7 availability are critical for improving user experience.
Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN adopts technologies, such as the separation of dynamic and static content and intelligent routing, to help game vendors build the capability to accelerate the delivery of dynamic and static content. DCND helps reduce the loads on the origin server, improves the response speed of websites or apps, and provides a stable and smooth gameplay experience.
Customer benefits
Improved user experience
An optimal network experience can help increase customer retention.
Service availability
A distributed, elastic scale-out, and highly available architecture is available.
Easy access
You can quickly access Alibaba Cloud DCDN by using simple interface configurations without modifying your network architecture.
Cost-effectiveness
You can shift the computing and bandwidth resources from the origin server to the POPs to reduce costs.
Quick start
You can access DCDN by following the procedure.
Scenario | Description | References |
Quick access to DCDN | Quickly activate DCDN to accelerate content delivery. | |
Dynamic and static content delivery | Intelligently identify static and dynamic content. Static content such as images, JavaScript Style Sheets (JSS) files, and CSS files is cached on DCDN POPs. Users can directly retrieve the cached static content from the nearest DCDN POPs. Requests for dynamic content, such as POST requests, are redirected to the origin server over an optimal route selected based on intelligent routing. | |
IP Application Accelerator | Provide services to non-standard HTTP protocol users, especially those using Layer 4 proprietary protocols. IP Application Accelerator (IPA) accelerates network transmission, reduces access latency, and improves service availability. | |
Security | Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects web servers against vulnerabilities, such as domain hijacking, website vulnerabilities, and data leaks. Bot traffic management protects your business from malicious traffic or crawlers. | |
More acceleration regions | Global and Global (Excluding the Chinese Mainland) are supported. Requests can be scheduled to POPs that are nearest to the users. |