While we’re all waiting to log in, I was wondering if Blizzard would or has considered moving to cloud based servers similar to Guild Wars 2 to maintain near constant uptime (including maintenance cycles). I imagine this would be more of a budget thing, but the pay-off for the end-user would be phenomenal.
with cloud base servers it 50/50
I doubt it makes sense.
The amount of content that WoW needs to be able to support, the number of instances, etc - all of this is not likely doable on cloud hosting at any appreciable scale without introducing more latency. And Latency is a big deal.
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and dont forget if the server dont save you have lost everything you did
it would be a massive increase in cost.
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wow downtime isn’t due to server infra, it’s because some mid-manager is given a budget of 6-8 hours downtime each week, and the safest thing for his career is to use maximum amount of it.
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Someone in charge hasn’t been convinced it would be worth the time and money to implement.
There’s a lot of hardware that’s paid for running wow right now that would be sitting around collecting dust while you’d be paying monthly charges on compute.
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With all the abstraction of servers in shards, layers, CRZs, etc, the game has been moving slowly (very slowly) in that direction for years. Even warbands appear to involve some under-the-hood stuff to help.
But will we live to see the day when WoW is capable of fully always-on live-update servers? I don’t have remotely enough knowledge of all the duct tape and baler twine to even guess at the time/cost needed.
… in a way it is. And it going doing down wouldn’t change with cloud servers, either.
You still need time to replace bad ram, apply patches, clean and maintain the servers, etc.
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If Blizzard were to use any cloud infrastructure it would be Microsoft’s Azure Cloud rather than AWS.
Hate to tell you but our AWS server has maintenance tomorrow morning lmao
What does AWS stand for, anyway?
Amazon Web Services.
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Thanks for answering! I really appreciate it!
Wasn’t sure what it stood for.
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I’m sure they’re running in Microsoft Azure. Or at least there’s plans to. Microsoft, which owns Activision Blizzard, runs one of the largest clouds on the planet, and is a competitor of AWS.
Uh… Cloud does not introduce latency by itself.
It’s literally someone else’s Datacenter.
If the architecture is already cloud-optimized, as it should, it might even be better than their own DC, depending on WoW specific network quirks, which I don’t think are many.
It would NOT solve the maintenance issue though, because the game simply wasn’t originally coded for live maintenance.
It would be a truly massive undertaking to rewrite the game’s core code for it.
The amount of Petabyes of data Blizz has would take DAYS to upload to cloud servers. Not sure they will ever make that jump.
They have their own servers, no reason to use someone else’s servers. Even if they did, the down time is because they have to get the new content running. That would probably take longer if they were using the cloud (i.e. someone else’s servers).
Palia uses cloud based servers. They have downtime for maintenance and patches.
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cloud servers wouldnt really change anything, servers still need to go down to refresh the ram and all that, cause if you dont, the server begins to lock up and stutter