September 10, 2013

Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds, has announced that they use Riak to manage their exponential data growth from their cartoon series, Angry Birds Toons, and their new mobile video games.

In March of 2013, Rovio’s games had been downloaded 1.7 billion times, with hundreds of millions of active users. Their upcoming mobile game and cartoon series were expected to draw in an even larger audience. However, since popularity can be hard to predict, Rovio needed an infrastructure that could support viral growth if needed, without failing and causing downtime. Similarly, if demand was lower than anticipated, they also needed the flexibility to rein back the infrastructure to avoid unnecessary expenditure. Riak’s ease-of-scale was the perfect solution to support this uncertainty and now the Rovio IT team is able to scale from tens of Riak servers to hundreds based on customer demand.

Riak was also selected due to its robust, low-latency features, which have ensured that customers receive the service levels they have come to expect. Riak replicates data across multiple nodes within the database, meaning even if nodes fails, the system maintains its high performance profile and never loses critical user data. Finally, Riak supports multiple data formats, which means consistent services are guaranteed regardless of the type of device a gamer is using.

Since implementing with Riak, internal development has become much more streamlined due to Riak’s operational simplicity. The new in-house user-interface named “Bigbird Library” was built on top of Riak and provides Rovio’s developers with a consistent and simple interface. This means that less time is spent grappling with complex IT systems, and more time can instead be focused on improving existing services and developing new, engaging content.

For more details about why Rovio chose Riak and why distributed systems such as Riak are the right solution for gaming companies, check out Timo Herttua’s (Rovio Entertainment Product Manager) talk from the Game Developers Conference.

For more information on building gaming services with Riak, check out the Gaming Spotlight page and download the Gaming on Riak Whitepaper.

Basho