Tag Archives: gaming

GDC Video: Riak at Rovio

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May 6, 2013

At the Game Developers Conference this March, Basho Chief Architect Andy Gross and Rovio Entertainment Product Manager Timo Herttua co-presented a session on Riak at Rovio. Angry Birds developer Rovio is using Riak as the database supporting its new mobile gaming platform, including features such as payments, game state storage, and push notifications. The Croods game was the first to use this new platform and is now available on Android and iOS.

In this video, Andy and Timo discuss how Rovio uses Riak and the data storage requirements for today’s high-scale, high-performance gaming platforms. Topics covered include:

  • Why gaming companies are moving to NoSQL to meet changing business requirements
  • How to evaluate distributed systems and databases like Riak
  • Structuring applications for common gaming use cases
  • Setting up and optimizing Riak, with a look at how Rovio uses Riak on the Amazon cloud
  • Use cases for Riak at Rovio, including push notifications, user profiles, and game state
  • Lessons learned from running Riak in production

For more information on building gaming services with Riak, download the Riak on Gaming whitepaper. This video is also available on the GDC Vault. Enjoy!

Gaming with NoSQL from Basho Technologies on Vimeo.

Rovio and Riak at GDC This Week

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March 26, 2013

Basho is a proud sponsor of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), happening this week in San Francisco. GDC is the world’s largest and longest running game industry event.

On Wednesday, March 27 at 11:00am, Basho Chief Architect, Andy Gross, and Rovio Entertainment Product Manager, Timo Herttua, will be co-presenting in room 3022 of the West Hall. The talk will discuss how Rovio uses Riak, the data storage requirements for today’s high-scale and high-performance gaming platforms, and how to run distributed systems in production.

Angry Birds developer Rovio is using Riak as the database supporting its new mobile gaming platform, including features such as payments, game state storage, and push notifications. The Croods game, launched last week, was the first to use this new platform. The Croods game is now available on Android and iOS.

If you’re at GDC this week, make sure to stop by our booth (#202), get a t-shirt, and learn how top gaming companies are using Riak.

If you’re not at GDC, but would like to learn more about Riak and how it can be used for gaming platforms, download “Gaming on Riak: A Technical Introduction,” or visit our gaming page.

Basho

Spotlight: Riak for Retail, Advertising, Mobile, and Gaming

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March 25, 2013

We have a few new pages on our site to help you start building retail, advertising, mobile, or gaming apps and services on Riak. On each of these pages, you will find industry use cases for Riak, relevant case studies from companies already using it in production, and information on Riak’s key/value model and querying features. Here’s a quick overview:

Retail

Riak lets retailers provide always-on, highly scalable eCommerce and mobile services. Retail use cases for Riak include:

  • Shopping carts
  • Product catalogs
  • Mobile applications/sites

The retail page also looks at how Best Buy, ideeli, and Copious use Riak. For more details, visit the Retail Users Page.

Advertising

Advertisers need to serve data reliably and quickly. Common ways advertisers leverage Riak include:

  • Serving ad content
  • Session storage
  • Mobile experiences

OpenX and Velti are two examples of advertisers using Riak. For more details, visit the Advertising Users Page.

Mobile

Riak provides the scalable, small object storage required by mobile applications and platforms. Riak can be used for many different mobile needs, including:

  • User and session data storage
  • Text and multimedia storage
  • Social authentication

The mobile page also highlights case studies from popular applications Bump and Voxer. For more details, visit the Mobile Users Page.

Gaming

Gaming platforms and applications benefit from Riak’s scale-out, low-latency design, and flexible storage capabilities. Some common use cases include:

  • Player data
  • Session data
  • Social information
  • Gaming assets

This page looks at some gaming companies using Riak, including Kiip, Mochi Media, and Hibernum, and why they chose Riak. For more details, visit the Gaming Users Page.

You can find user stories from other industries here. And make sure to sign up for our Introduction to Riak webcast, tomorrow at 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET.

Basho

Building Gaming Applications and Services with Riak

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March 13, 2013

For a complete overview, download the whitepaper, “Gaming on Riak: A Technical Introduction.” To see how other gaming companies are using Riak, visit us at the Game Developers Conference at Booth #202!

As discussed in our previous post, “Gaming on Riak: A Brief Overview and User Case Studies,” Riak can provide a number of advantages for gaming platforms. Content agnostic, an HTTP API, many client libraries, and a simple key/value data model, Riak is a flexible data store that can be used for a variety of different use cases in the gaming industry. This post looks at some common examples and how to start building them in Riak.

Use Cases

Player and Session Data: Riak can serve and store key player and session data with predictable low latency, and ensures it is available even in the event of node failure and network partition. This data may include user and profile information, game performance, statistics and rankings, and more. In Riak, all objects are stored on disk as binaries, providing flexible storage for many content types. Since Riak is schema-less, applications can evolve without changing an underlying schema, providing agility with growth and change.

Social Information: Riak can be used for social content such as social graph information, player profiles and relationships, social authentication accounts, and other types of social gaming data.

Content: Riak is often used to store text, documents, images, videos and other assets that power gaming experiences. This data often needs to be highly available and able to scale quickly to attract and keep users.

Global Data Locality: Gaming requires a low-latency experience, no matter where the players are located. Riak Enterprise’s multi-datacenter replication feature means data can be served to global users quickly.

Data Model

Below are some common approaches to structuring gaming data with Riak’s key/value model:

Riak offers robust additional functionality on top of the fundamental key/value model. For more information on these options as well as how to implement them, their architecture, and their limitations, check out the documentation on searching and accessing data in Riak.

Riak Search
Riak Search is a distributed, full-text search engine. It provides support for various MIME types & analyzers, and robust querying including exact matches, wildcards, range queries, proximity searches, and more.
Possible Use Cases: Searching player and game information.

Secondary Indexing
Secondary Indexing (2i) gives developers the ability, at write time, to tag an object stored in Riak with one or more queryable values. Indexes can be either integers or strings and can be queried by either exact matches or ranges of an index.
Possible Use Cases: Tagging player information with user relationships, general attributes, or other metadata.

MapReduce
Developers can leverage MapReduce for analytic and aggregation tasks. It offers support for both JavaScript and Erlang MapReduce.
Possible Use Cases: Filtering game data by tag, counting items, and extracting links to related data.

To learn more about how your gaming platform can benefit from Riak, download “Gaming on Riak: A Technical Introduction.” For more information about Riak, sign up for our webcast on Thursday, March 14.

Basho

Gaming on Riak: A Brief Overview and User Case Studies

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March 12, 2013

Riak provides low-latency, highly available storage to power gaming platforms and applications. Gaming companies use Riak to store player and game data, session and social information, and a variety of gaming content and events. This post offers a quick look at the advantages of Riak and some user case studies. Later this week, we’ll publish an in-depth look at the common gaming use cases and examples of data modeling.

For a complete overview, download the whitepaper, “Gaming on Riak: A Technical Introduction.”

Advantages of Riak

  • Support for Rapid Growth: Built for operational ease-of-use, Riak yields a near-linear performance and throughput increase as capacity is added.
  • Low-Latency Design: Riak is designed to store data and serve requests predictably and quickly, even during peak times.
  • Flexible, Reliable Storage: Riak has a flexible data model with redundancy built-in, and a number of mechanisms to maintain availability even in the event of node failure or network partition. Riak is content-agnostic, providing flexibility for document, image, video, and other storage.
  • Multi-Datacenter Replication: Riak Enterprise’s multi-datacenter replication provides disaster recovery and data locality.

Case Studies

Hibernum is a creator and developer of unique gaming experiences that combine the latest in social gaming, top quality visuals and animations, and cutting edge design. They switched from a relational database to Riak due to its high availability, ability to scale to peak loads, and predictable operational cost. Riak is used to store user game information for one of their most popular social games. For more information about how Hibernum uses Riak, check out the complete case study.

Kiip is a platform that lets brands provide rewards to mobile gamers for in-game achievements. Kiip replaced MongoDB with Riak in order to achieve low read/write latencies and horizontal scalability. Kiip uses Riak for session and device data. To learn more about Kiip’s experience selecting Riak, check out this video by two of their engineers.

To learn more about how your gaming platform can benefit from Riak, download “Gaming on Riak: A Technical Introduction.” For more information about Riak, sign up for out webcast on Thursday, March 14.

Basho

Hibernum Selects Riak for User Data Storage

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February 19, 2013

Hibernum is a creator and developer of unique gaming experiences that combine the latest in social gaming, top quality visuals and animations, and cutting edge design. They use Riak to store user game information for one of their most popular social games.

Hibernum Homepage

Currently, Hibernum’s Riak installation serves thousands of requests per second to more than a million monthly active users. User data is stored in Riak as JSON objects, and Hibernum uses Riak’s HTTP interface, a perfect fit for their Node.js-based application server. As the game grows in popularity, millions of new entries are generated and stored in Riak, as well as any updates or modifications that may occur during gameplay. Mario Lefebvre, IT Specialist at Hibernum, has said that Riak is “managing this load like a charm and is a stable and rock solid solution.”

Originally, Hibernum was using a relational database, however, they found the manual sharding required to scale was operationally intensive and inefficient. They needed something that could better handle their significant growth and started looking for a cost-efficient solution that could support the large amount of requests, as well as a solution that allowed for easy scalability. After testing multiple solutions, Riak was chosen for its high availability, ability to scale to peak loads, and predictable operational cost.

To learn more about how Hibernum uses Riak, check out the complete case study.

Basho