Social Game Universe

Social Game Universe is a social games innovator with social media apps Hollywood Tycoon and Avastar on Facebook, and is developing technology that will enhance the social aspects of “social” gaming for developers everywhere.

Environment

• Six 1 GiB Joyent SmartMachines using PHP and Memcached
• Zeus SmartMachine

• MySQL Smart Machine with master/slave replication

“"Joyent's account management team offered us excellent service in identifying the best architecture for our initial deployment. Their involvement actually helped to reduce our service cost based on their recommended testing." ” - Francis Pelland, Technical Director, Social Game Universe

The Challenge

Resource Management. As the technical team at Social Game Universe compared cloud service costs, it found that many vendors charged extra for scalability engineering and management. They wanted a vendor that could engineer its scalability and bundle all the services and equipment they needed for one price.

Scalability. Social Game Universe required a platform that could absorb sudden spikes in traffic without losing performance or bringing down services as new partner customers log in to the Social Game Universe network.

Customization. With multiple partner games coming online to its network, Social Game Universe needed the ability to spread its users across multiple servers to balance the load yet preserve the gaming experience. The system required a powerful yet flexible way to balance user loads and maintain user statistics.

Reliability. The company demanded 24X7 uptime to deliver the best-performing social gaming experience possible.

Scalability. Social Game Universe needed the ability to grow its infrastructure on-demand to meet spikes in customer workloads and hundreds–perhaps thousands–of new customer signups.

After its extensive comparisons of cloud service providers, Social Game Universe decided that Joyent delivered the best package of technology, services, and support for its connected gaming universe. Joyent delivers the following critical elements for the Social Game Universe cloud:

The Solution

Consultative Planning. Joyent worked with Social Game Universe to identify a cost model that was much lower than Joyent's largest competitor. Pricing projections for scale of up to 1.5 million daily active users was almost 50% less expensive simply because Social Game Universe will require fewer servers to scale due to Joyent’s unique architecture and software design.

Effortless Scalability. “With Joyent, I don’t have to monitor our servers all the time. If there’s a burst of traffic, the Joyent cloud allocates resources to make sure we don’t lose performance or customers. No other cloud provider does this,” said CTO Francis Pelland. “With the Joyent cloud we can add resources easily if we decide customer traffic levels consistently demand more resources,” Pelland added.

Professional Support. Joyent provided initial system engineering and scalability support for Social Game Universe but also delivers ongoing technical support. “Whenever we’ve had a question, Joyent gives us an answer, usually within minutes,” said Pelland. The company also consulted with Joyent engineering to adapt load balancing scripts for better performance of its platform.

Reliability and Security.“ I have full confidence in the security of Joyent's cloud,” said Pelland. “And I love the fact that with Joyent’s automatic bursting capacity if a server ever goes down I can quickly and quietly replace it. Users will never notice.” The Joyent cloud is also highly resilient, with multiple data centers spread throughout North America that house redundant network, storage, and application resources in the event of any equipment failure or local disaster.

Visit Social Game Universe.

For more detail, download the pdf case study below.