Tag Archives: GDC

“Riak for Games” at the Game Developers Conference

March 17, 2014

This week is the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. GDC is the largest, professionals-only game industry events and brings together programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals, business decision-makers, and more to exchange ideas and shape the future of the industry. Basho is a proud sponsor of GDC and this is our second year speaking and exhibiting at the event.

On Thursday, March 20th, join us for the session, “Riak for Games,” presented by Quark Games and Basho. The talk will be about database choices, mistakes, successes, and lessons learned by the presenters: Eric Liaw and Seth Thomas. Eric, Co-Founder at Quark Games, will give insight from five years of mobile game development. Seth, Technical Evangelist at Basho Technologies, will give insight from his time at Vigil and SOE, as well as success stories from current Riak customers. Their talk will be at 11:30am in Room 3020, West Hall.

In addition to this session, Basho will also be exhibiting. Be sure and stop by our booth to talk Riak and pick up some great swag.

Riak is an ideal solution for many gaming use cases, including storing session data, player stats, and user profile information. For more information on how companies like Rovio, Riot Games, Hibernum, and Mochi Media use Riak, check out our Riak Users Page. To learn more about why Riak is a fit for gaming, download our whitepaper, “Riak on Gaming.”

Basho

Basho Events in March

March 5, 2014

This month features a wide range of developer events, major conferences, and various meetups. Here’s a look at some of where we’ll be in March.

Erlang Factory: Erlang Factory SF brings together the rapidly growing community that uses Erlang in order to showcase the language and its various application to today’s distributed environments. Come hear talks by Basho’s own Tom Santero, Joseph Blomstedt, Chris Meiklejohn, and Joe DeVivo. We will also have a table set up to answer any questions about Riak. Erlang Factory takes place March 6-7 in San Francisco.

Game Developer’s Conference: GDC is the largest gaming industry event and will take place March 17-21 in San Francisco. Eric Liaw (Co-Founder and Developer, Quark Games) and Seth Thomas (Technical Evangelist, Basho) will be speaking on “Riak for Gaming” on Thursday, March 20th at 11:30am. Basho will also be exhibiting, so stop by and grab a t-shirt.

Clojure/West: Clojure/West takes place March 24-26 in San Francisco. Basho engineer, Reid Draper, will be speaking on “Powerful Testing with simple-check” and the Basho team will be available to answer questions about Riak.

Meetups: On March 12th, Hector Castro (Basho Technical Evangelist) will talk about Riak CS at OpenStack Boston. Both Tom Santero (Basho Technical Evangelist) and Hector Castro will talk about Riak CS and the underlying architecture, Riak, at OpenStack Connecticut on March 18th. Tom Santero will present on Highly Available Applications in the Cloud on March 19th at OpenStack New York. Finally, Hector Castro will talk about Riak CS and Riak at OpenStack Philly on March 20th.

For a full list of where we’ll be, check out the Events Page.

Basho

Rovio Uses Riak to Power Angry Birds Toons and New Mobile Games

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

GDC Video: Riak at Rovio

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.