After a bit of research I’ve come across the general consensus that Blizzard hosts their actual games on their own internal servers in their own cloud. I could be wrong here as Blizzard has been pretty quiet on how they operate, but it’s drastically clear they don’t leverage third party cloud providers outside of smaller things like their launcher. It’s clear because the standard is AWS (Amazon’s cloud) and anyone hosting on their services are blasted to the public by Amazon and generally the company leveraging their services openly acknowledge their product being hosted on AWS.
With that being said, I think it’s time to move towards AWS, Blizzard. Let them handle security, hardware updates, defunct hardware replacement, system administration costs, networking, etc, etc. AWS provides you with the standard for cloud services. It’s literally their job and their product. I can’t even imagine the manpower and costs behind designing, setting up, and maintaining your own internal cloud. And for those out of the loop I’m referring to actual server warehouses. What Blizzard is doing is creating a product, which is the game, alongside another product to actually host it. Who do you think provides better DDOS protection, security, reliability, etc, etc. A company devoted to games or a company devoted to cloud services?
This would have been shot down pretty quickly, outside of the ISP hits, if everything was hosted on AWS and set up properly and no one can tell me otherwise.
Notice: A few regions for OW are hosted on AWS. They are regions that come off as areas Blizzard wants no part in to set up server warehouses. The servers you connect to in the Americas are internal to Blizzard.
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You’re either ridiculously naive or willfully ignorant to think that Amazon’s web service is immune to DDOS. Also it’s not a great service for a large company, especially one who’s entire business model is online gaming.
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its not the servers being ddosed, its the internet service providers. plus an update that seems to be causing problems also. where two people in same house, one can get on and the other cant.
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I’m naive? Most of Activision’s new games are moving to AWS. And just a “small” example here, Netflix is hosted on AWS. You have literally zero idea what you’re talking about.
You are 100% wrong on both accounts.
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You’re hilarious, dude. You can simply do a quick google and see articles pointing to the fact that over 90% of large game companies leverage AWS.
it isnt the servers. its the internet service providers. they are ddosing, the isps.
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I know where Netflix hosts many of their servers, I know people who have physically worked on them. I also know where Activision Blizzard has some servers, I have physically walked past them.
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And? Destiny 2 still gets DDoS’ed
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/waves arms around wildly
hey, op. isp not game servers. isp.
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Straight up 10 IQ and arguing from authority with no substance. Activision was literally featured at AWS:ReInvent.
They’ve literally done a case study on Netflix on AWS that will take you half a second to google. You’re lucky I can’t post links.
ISPs weren’t hit until today.
thats not what i heard yesterday.
You really should try taking your own advice and Google it yourself. Come back to me when you find out something.
OP’s position is a typical “IT Manager” position. Apparently if you move everything to AWS, its going to be immune to computer problems.
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Migrating with microservices
In 2008, Netflix was running relational databases in its own data centres when disaster struck. A data centre failure shut the entire service down and stopped DVD shipments for three days.
The company’s owners faced a choice: turn Netflix into a world-class data centre operations company or move the service to the public cloud.
Netflix was growing fast. The thousands of videos and tens of millions of customers was already generating an enormous quantity of data. The company would struggle to rack the servers in their own data centres fast enough to handle the ever-growing volumes, but the cloud would let them add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes.
A migration to the cloud was the clear choice. They soon became a poster child customer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), choosing the company for its scale and broad set of services and features.
The move would require a complete rearchitecting of the company’s traditional infrastructure though. They could have forklifted all of their monolithic enterprise systems out of the data centre and dropped them into AWS, but this would only have brought all of their old data centre problems to the cloud. Instead, they chose to rebuild the Netflix technology in AWS and fundamentally change the way that the company operated.
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erm. whats that mean? i dont get the joke. 'splain?
Benefits of the cloud
It took Netflix seven years to complete the migration to the cloud. In 2016, the last remaining data centres used by the streaming service were shut down. In its place was a new cloud infrastructure running all of Netflix’s computing and storage needs, from customer information to recommendation algorithms.
The migration improved Netflix’s scalability and service availability and the velocity by which the company could release new content, features, interfaces and interactions. It also freed up the capacity of engineers, cut the costs of streaming, drastically improved availability and added the experience and expertise of AWS.
“The other thing is that the cost model is really nice for us,” added Hahn. “You pay for what you use. That allows us to do a lot of experimentations.”
This gives them greater freedom to test new features and improve existing ones, such as the rows of content recommendations that are personalised every day.
“These large recommendation algorithms require a lot of compute work,” Hahn explained. "If I want to find out if a new one we’re playing with does better, I don’t want to turn off the old one, because you still need recommendations.
“I can now spin up an entirely new set of machines in the tens, or hundreds or thousands in an afternoon and chunk through my data and see if we’ve done better, and I only pay for the portions I use. It allows us an amazing amount of freedom in experimentation.”
Took ten seconds
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ohh yeah no. amazon already too big.
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