Azure helps Yunchan games to speed up the process of going to sea

"Azure's global regional coverage and low network latency fully meet the company's overseas game deployment needs. The free VIP-level technical support services provided to game companies make our global expansion without worries."

——Sun Tao, head of Yunchan game operation and maintenance

Azure products used

virtual machine

MySQL

CDN service

Web App

Storage service

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1MA411w7PR/?aid=null&cid=null&page=1

About Yunchan Games

Shanghai Yunchan Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Yunchan Game") is an online game company founded in 2008 by a group of senior game developers. In the early days of the company's establishment, Yunchan Games relied on its strong R&D capabilities to produce a large-scale terminal game "Shu Men", creating an amazing result of 80 million registered users and 500,000 online at the same time. Relying on the success of "Shu Gate", the scale of Yunchan's game has expanded rapidly, and products such as "Drunk Xiaoyao", "Iron Armored Hero" and "Shu Gate Mobile Game" have been successively launched. At present, Yunchan Games has become a large-scale online game company with hundreds of employees, operating two business lines of mobile games and mobile games at the same time, integrating R&D and operations. In 2019, Yunchan Games began to expand overseas markets, by deploying games on the Azure cloud platform to provide services to players around the world.

Business needs and challenges

In the past, Yunchan Games was mainly oriented to the domestic market. With the development of its business, the importance of globalization has become increasingly prominent. For this reason, starting from 2019, Yunchan Games has decided to go overseas to expand the European and American markets and choose to use the world's largest game publishing platform Steam To release its terminal game product "Iron Armored Warrior", its mobile game product "Shu Men Mobile Game" is released in cooperation with local operators. For the first time in the overseas market, Yunchan Games did not understand the overseas network situation, and the first requirement for a game to give players a good experience is the "low latency" of the network, because most games are very sensitive to the network speed. There are very high requirements. For example, "Steel Armor" has very high requirements for the real-time performance of data packet processing. "In fact, game manufacturers will face the same challenges when they go overseas. The most important thing is to solve the problem of network latency, achieve global uniform service, and ensure a smooth game experience for global players, while also meeting the needs of operation and maintenance." Yunchan Games Sun Tao, head of operation and maintenance, said. Although Yunchan Games has adopted cloud platforms to deploy game products since the first game, the previous cloud platforms mainly serve the domestic and Southeast Asian markets. Therefore, in order to enter the global market, Yunchan Games needs to choose another cloud platform After analyzing, testing and comparing mainstream cloud platforms, Yunchan Games finally chose to use Azure, hoping to provide a good experience for Yunchan Games' overseas users through Azure's global infrastructure and stable services.

Why choose Azure

Yunchan Games has strong R&D capabilities, and always insists on fully considering the system's cross-platform capabilities from the beginning of game development, and is not tied to any cloud platform, which makes Yunchan Games fully flexible in choosing cloud platforms . When choosing a cloud platform for overseas business, Yunchan Games conducted a complete technical verification of the alternative cloud platform, conducted network-level tests through third-party services, and observed the delays from the network to the server of each regional operator. After careful Tested and compared, and finally chose Azure. Global coverage, low network latency, controllable costs, and excellent technical support services for overseas game manufacturers are the main reasons Yunchan Games chose Azure.

Global coverage and low network latency

"Compared with other cloud platforms, Azure is more widely distributed across the world, especially the European and American regions we are concerned about have enough POPs, and the network latency between regions is very low, which can help us achieve a low-latency global Game architecture." Sun Tao said. In fact, Azure has more than 60 regions and more than 160 edge nodes around the world, and it is directly connected to the networks of more than 1,000 ISPs, IXPs, and customers and partners around the world. This allows users to be in almost every country and city in the world. It is connected to the nearest Azure network, so that gamers around the world can access games deployed on Azure through the optimal low-latency link. In order to reduce network latency, Azure has adopted a series of measures, such as providing Internet-based traffic engineering services to dynamically optimize the stability and availability of connections with customers, and continuously optimize link latency. In addition, Azure's SWAN system uses SDN to implement services such as control of link detection between data centers, optimization of utilization, and capacity expansion prediction. Azure's self-built SD optical network enables comprehensive and integrated management of the IP layer and optical layer, eliminates errors caused by human configuration, and dynamically coordinates the optimal link services to provide customers. This series of measures can ensure that the customer's global deployment of games on the same server can minimize network delays, expand more easily to more regions, and accept more player groups.

Controllable cost

Yunchan Games has very detailed planning and estimation in cost control. How to balance costs and benefits? How to reduce the cost of using cloud resources while continuing to provide players with the ultimate gaming experience? This is a problem that Yunchan Games is very concerned about. The deployment of Yunchan Games on Azure adopts the traditional IaaS method. Therefore, one of the main factors affecting the cost is the cost of using cloud resources, including virtual machines, storage, databases, etc., and the annual subscription reserved instance (RI) provided by Azure The model provides help for Yunchan game to control the cost. Azure RI provides enterprise customers with a very flexible annual price and business model of virtual machine packages, which is simple and flexible to use, and can be changed on demand. Compared with other cloud platforms, Azure RI is more flexible. Customers can change the type, size, terms, region, and operating system of the virtual machine at any time. Customers can purchase virtual machines at the annual subscription price, saving up to 72% of the cost, but they only need to pay on a monthly basis when paying, thereby saving capital costs. In case of excessive purchases, customers can also cancel at any time, as long as the annual cancellation quota No more than US$50,000 is enough. At present, Azure's annual subscription reserved instance supports not only virtual machines, but also other cloud services such as storage and databases.

Excellent technical support

It is the first time for Yunchan Games to go overseas, and it is also the first time to use Azure. It is inevitable to encounter problems in actual use, and Microsoft provides free VIP-level support services to game customers, so that Yunchan Games' global expansion has no worries. "Because Azure pays more attention to security and other aspects, we encountered some problems in the initial use of Portal and some PaaS services. Through communication and training with the Microsoft support team, we changed some usage methods to achieve security and ease of use. The double guarantees used to solve these problems. At the same time, during the game launch, the Azure technical service team has dedicated personnel to respond to our problems in real time, and provide us with high-priority enterprise-level VIP services to help us solve the problems in time. ." Sun Tao said.

Solutions and benefits

In order to ensure the consistency of game back-end management during the deployment of Yunchan Games, the deployment on Azure adopted the traditional IaaS model. During the online process, it was fully supported by the Microsoft architect team. It only took less than two weeks. In time, the deployment of the two games "Iron Armored Soldier" and "Shu Men Mobile Game" was completed. Figure 1 is a schematic diagram of the architecture of Yunchan Games based on Azure deployment.

Figure 1 Schematic diagram of the architecture of Yunchan Game based on Azure deployment

Yunchan Games uses virtual machines, storage services, MySQL, CDN services and Web App. Game applications, hypervisors, etc. are deployed on virtual machines through scripts, and high-frequency virtual machines are selected, which can not only reduce game jams, but also the number of players that each server can host. In terms of application acceleration, Yunchan Game uses Azure CDN service for large file distribution, page acceleration and other static content acceleration scenarios. Among the three CDN options provided by Azure CDN, Yunchan Game has been tested and compared and selected one of them One way, while meeting performance requirements, it also simplifies management.

Up to now, Yunchan games have used Azure’s POP points in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The Asian server, North American server, South American server and European server of "Steel Armor" have been successfully launched and have been running normally for more than a year. "Gate Mobile Games" Asia Server has also been successfully launched and ran smoothly, providing players in various regions with a good gaming experience. The benefits of using Azure to Yunchan games are mainly reflected in three aspects: First, it can quickly launch and deploy games on a global scale, greatly shortening the game launch cycle, and there is no IT load capacity limitation at all. With the increase in the number of players, the capacity can be expanded at any time. When the number of players in a certain area increases, the demand can be met by adding access points. Azure's low-latency network ensures that players of Yunchan games can get a smooth gaming experience; second , Based on Azure’s basic security functions and Azure’s powerful DDoS Protection service, it can ensure that games deployed on Azure can deal with various attacks without any worries; third, use Web App services to complete the development of game peripheral applications, simplifying some sites and The API release process has greatly increased the speed of deployment and updates. In the future, Yunchan Games will speed up the process of going to sea and deploy games in more areas of Azure.

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