How a social gaming company achieved 8X faster access to Amazon web services

The Tigers were about to beat The Warriors at a multiplayer real-time strategy video game and win the Gaming World Championship Playoffs when a series of network issues hit the tournament. The lag caused the playoffs to be rescheduled, and The Warriors ended up winning the rematch and the $2 million prize money.

You can only imagine the plight of these professional players when they were unable to play because of network issues. If the organizers had been with a network that did not have any lag issues, the result of the playoffs could have been very different and nobody would have been left with a bad taste in their mouths.

Gaming company experiences inconsistent latencies and packet loss
The application performances for gaming companies suffer drastically over the Internet, especially in locations such as China, India, Europe, and the Middle East. So, when a high-flying mobile game platform company synced data over the unpredictable and unreliable Internet, it experienced slow speeds, inconsistent latencies, and packet loss.

With data stored in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) clouds in Beijing and San Jose, tens of millions of users, and over 13 game titles on Symbian, Java, Android, and iOS, the company faced a major challenge – should they use IP VPN, which would only marginally improve the network performance, or should they look for an alternative that would deliver faster access to AWS, provide stable latency, and produce less than a 1% packet loss?

After an extensive research process, which included looking at traditional WAN solutions like IP VPN and MPLS, the gaming company discovered Aryaka’s cloud acceleration solution.

The true differentiator – Aryaka’s global private network
Aryaka provides a solution to the problems faced by most gaming companies. Aryaka’s global private network has multiple points of presence (POPs) across the world. It provides a highly consistent network experience because it is interconnected via multiple private Layer 2 links to deliver reliable, enterprise-grade, full-mesh connectivity and to bypass the congestion and packet loss that occurs on the Internet.

Aryaka Software-Defined Network Platform

Furthermore, Aryaka’s unique multi-segment architecture enables the full use of bandwidth, while optimizing the transmission of all applications running across long-distance networks and mitigating the effect of latency and packet loss.

The private network is a key part of Aryaka’s Software-Defined Network Platform. And with WAN optimization as part of the platform, the global private network minimizes the latency that is typically experienced by global end-users.

Also, Aryaka’s agreement with AWS means that Aryaka has direct private connections to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments, and also provides end-to-end WAN Path Control for site-to-site and site-to-IaaS connectivity.

Aryaka’s cloud acceleration solution: the results

Using Aryaka’s cloud acceleration solution, the social gaming company achieved the following benefits:

• Up to 8x faster access and performance for AWS between China and the United States
• Up to 16X faster transmission control protocol (TCP) connection setup
• Stable core latency of 197 ms between POPs with 0% packet loss
• Deployment within 48 hours at all office locations, plus real-time network visibility
• World class support available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year

The right network solution for gaming companies
The biggest challenge that online gaming companies face today is reaching the largest possible global audience. However, a large number of consumers are located in areas where the Internet infrastructure is still not optimal for an end-user’s experience. A slow load time is a key reason why users leave an online game.

With an increase in the gaming apps available, mobile games are set to generate more revenue than online games. By 2018, $4 of every $10 spent by gamers will be on mobile games, and the revenue from mobile games is forecasted to grow from $29 billion in 2015 to $45 billion by 2018. However, lags are a menace and, for a gaming company, can be the difference between retaining an audience and shutting down shop. It is no wonder that online gaming companies are on the constant lookout for the right network solution.

With Aryaka and its global private network, gaming companies can access the cloud from anywhere and the cloud acceleration solution accelerates traffic for all data transfers, providing a faster optimized network as well as connectivity for global locations, with guaranteed throughput and availability.

As a result, when players compete in gaming championships, they will encounter a stable gaming experience in which the network’s performance will not affect the outcome. The gaming companies will get a business differentiator – a global private network – that will help them retain their core user base and increase their revenues compared with their competitors who rely on the Internet for their network needs.

If you are an online gaming company, check Aryaka out for yourself and participate in a free trial!

About the author

Gary Sevounts

Gary Sevounts is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks, and is responsible for Aryaka’s global marketing efforts. He has extensive experience with software and SaaS products in the IT infrastructure and security space, as well as marketing and sales technology, having held marketing and product management leadership roles with a number of industry leaders.