Yeah, I honestly don’t know enough about what Blizzard has setup, or how good AWS is in comparison. It might be a lot better. I know back from my limited experience of hosting IRCds and Eggdrop shells, I was getting a lot of DDOS attacks on my customers and I switched to a different datacenter to host my servers that specialized in DDOS protection, and it made a major difference. So AWS might be better, I feel like only a network person at Blizzard would really know.
Try to be hired by blizzard first.
What is your intention posting it here? You expect Blizzard go “aha, that’s a good idea”?
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Do you have any evidence of their Shield Advanced being swamped in any production system?
SEATTLE — March 19, 2018 — Today at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon company (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced that more than 90 percent of the world’s biggest public game companies*, including Activision, Supercell, and Ubisoft are using AWS. Players demand flawless technical execution, constant innovation, and seamless online experiences from their games, and AWS helps game makers invent on behalf of their customers at every stage of development – from production and highly-scalable multiplayer infrastructure management, to live service operations, Twitch integrations, innovations with Alexa voice-enabled gameplay, and massive-scale machine learning.
Wasn’t all cloud customers. Strictly gaming. You can copy and search that if you want since I can’t provide links.
back in 2016 there was a big deal about about netflix and amazon both going down to ddos again stop trying to compare video games to websites its being dishonest
Just pointing it out. Also, a dreadful thing in the world of engineering is tech debt and investment. Companies can get so entangled in their own web that they can’t get out of it. A lot of companies have it where they have to sit there and wonder how they could just straight up dump tens of millions of dollars of hardware (server warehouses), redesign their approach (tens of millions of dollars), and actually implement it (tens of millions of dollars). Companies get to far in to back out.
Dude stop spreading garbage information everywhere you go. OP is correct.
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Comparing 2016 AWS to 2019 AWS is dishonest.
sigh it gets hit all the time with ddosing sigh just because it is never fully knocked out does not mean it is not being hit by ddos again. how do you not understand this. yesterday the forum was also hit with a ddos yet people were able to still make use of it during the attack. your browsing a web page your not maintain a constant stable connection to the website you just pulling data down from the cloud. which means the connection can become extremely unstable and still be usable. in a video game if connection is even slightly unstable it leads to lags and disconnections. this is not even even going into how spread a website can be across a multitude of servers where gaming servers tend to be very limited in how many and where they can be.
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Are you cracked? AWS is THE cloud. The OP is absolutely correct.
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What gets hit? I don’t understand what you’re getting at in regards to saying something like AWS Shield Advanced can’t prevent this from happening for how long it happened. It WILL 100% prevent the majority of conventional DDOS attacks and a huge portion of larger companies leverage it. In the end let’s say I agree with you that a stateful MMO like WoW can’t leverage the same protection like web services. Shield Advance still provides 24/7 DRT (DDOS Response Team) services. Meaning if certain metrics point to a DDOS that you couldn’t 100% prevent Amazon themselves step in and handle it. It’s as simple as that. My post was saying they need to push off managing stuff like that on AWS and not trap themselves in their own internal mess. They aren’t a cloud company. Quit trying to be one.
Critical thinking time:
So Amazon’s support team steps in, much like Blizzard’s support team has done a fantastic job of doing this weekend. They take steps to handle a problem that there’s no solution for by means of public relations.
What did you gain?
Shifting services to different ISPs wouldn’t solve this much quicker? AWS can do that.
Every enterprise data center service provider also has 24 hour response teams for networking… Blizzard’s Network is MANAGED, it is not something they them selves control aside from the LAN portion… Their partners do leg work, their only involvement is to approve access to workers to their cabinets if needed for serial connections or for log access
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Yeah, but when you’re landlocked to your own internal data centers you aren’t able to provide anywhere near the services that a company like Amazon can throw your way. No way in hell. They could regurgitate their stack in a different region (different ISP as well) if they realized the DDOS was hitting a certain ISP. No way in hell can you do that if you are landlocked to your own data center. Blizzard isn’t rich enough for that no matter what you think. AWS by themselves make more money in a year than Activision-Blizzard is worth…
argh because a game company can’t have server in every freaking state not that amazon does but the point is your holding up a website and going look this website its not been DDOS ( which is has) . I could ddos one of amazon servers I would prob go to jail for doing it but i could do its not that hard. but even if i knocked out one of their servers most users would not experience any really loss of performance because amazon has to many servers spread around the world. this kind of set up works for websites and streaming services it doesn’t work that well for gaming though.
Does Blizzard host their own servers for WoW or use some cloud server outsourcing? If so, who does it?
Historically, Blizzard bought their own server hardware and located it in various colocation facilities that they did not own.
Over time, this built up a lot of hardware resources, used for various games and for Battle net , which could be re-purposed as needed.
Also, the software ran, in the old days, by actually locating you as you played WoW on a particular set of hardware dedicated to supporting your realm.
Over time this became…inconvenient…particularly as feature sets such as cross-server instances and “Looking For Raid” were developed.
Also, technology advanced to clouds and now containerization.
Still, however, I don’t believe Blizzard makes substantial use of an external 3rd party public cloud service, but manages largely internal cloud and container architecture.
Frank Trevor Gilson Product Head at Bigpoint Games Sept 6, 2019
Works just fine for gaming, data is data.
Netflix serve zero video content from AWS
I have the ability to see a large portion of Blizzards traffic in APAC, they are way way over-provisioned for their usage amount (40g vs 8g used), given this is the most expensive region in the world for data, it is safe to assume this is the norm network wide.
Proof: i.imgur .com/WKnSAiS.png
Your arrogance is astounding without knowing the details of the services you talk about.
Netflix Video Traffic: i.imgur .com/VLjGGSa.png
Amazon Traffic: i.imgur .com/LmVUAoX.png
The nature of this attack is not standard, Amazon would not be able to “route around it” in the following locations:
Sydney
Melbourne
Japan
California
Ireland
as they have only a single upstream carrier.
I suggest you go back to sales and that you have absolutely no access to any companies IT or networking infrastructure given the incorrect statements you are throwing around by pulling big names up who use partial services, for low-traffic impact.
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Thanks for the info and sources.
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Gee that would really be the day when Blizz takes the advice of a person making obnoxiously dense posts about cloud architecture and DDoS protection
This whole DDoS thing has brought forth the most cringeworthy wannabe sysadmin chatter