The gaming industry, like many of its software development counterparts, is continuously asked to quickly respond to the needs of its global audience. To make this happen, it must employ the best technology and production principles, and game developers have established several ways to take things from concept to creation.
However, because DevOps goes beyond agile’s ability to support responsive development, and edge computing, similarly, goes beyond a typical cloud providers’ ability to deliver a low latency experience, both can make the game development process more impactful and pain-free. In this blog, we’ll discuss how to do just that.
The name “DevOps” is yet another fairly self-explanatory technical term; it’s essentially the combination, automation, and collaboration of the efforts of Development and Operations teams. However, there is a lot more to DevOps that lies beneath the surface.
The concept of DevOps began to emerge in 2008, and by 2009 it had attracted enough curious followers to warrant its own event – DevOpsDays held in Belgium. Within a relatively short amount of time, it has become a commonly used approach to speedy agile software development because of its relevancy to any programming project. Ultimately, when executed correctly and efficiently, DevOps has the potential to help developers respond to rapidly changing competitive landscapes by quickly shipping customer-driven products and their updates faster while still providing a stable, reliable, and secure service.
Now, who wouldn’t want that?!
Video game development is often a long road that must lead to the creation of a flawless experience, even for those pushing beyond known boundaries. DevOps supports this goal because while its framework is designed to remove unnecessary manual steps to increases team agility and speed, it still reduces errors that could cause a launch to fail.
Additionally, it allows those deploying video game launches, updates, and patches to create a repeatable and recyclable process that continuously delivers new innovations to meet the needs of gamers worldwide. With less time spent focusing on defining and refining the process of getting things done, creators have more time to focus on imagining the next big thing and performing the actual work that must be completed to make it come to life.
Again – a little louder for those in the back – who wouldn’t want that?!?!
Ultimately, everyone involved in DevOps or video game development has one common goal – doing incredible things quickly, yet still reliably. edge computing takes this one step further by accelerating the delivery of these efforts with a low-latency, distributed architecture. It is uniquely capable of housing applications, data, and compute resources at locations geographically closer to end users than typical central cloud computing solutions. Essentially, edge Computing is more likely to be where the gamers are, and therefore much more capable of providing a flawless experience devoid of game state or synchronization issues.
When there’s something new to share or even something you want to remove, having a CDN and other compute resources at the edge is the best way to deliver everything quickly and reliably. And, on a general day-to-day basis outside of updates and releases, you can use the CDN to cache the most recently and frequently requested content in edge locations; this approach will also allow you to quickly allow you to scale based on demand. You can even reduce the number of requests to your gaming server(s) through Origin Shield technology.
Now, exactly how does everything come together?
Because of the wide variety of applications for both edge technologies and DevOps practices, there are almost an infinite number of ways the video game industry can put them to use. For illustration purposes, we’ll outline three scenarios just to make sure we show, instead of just tell.
Containers are essential for effective CI/CD practices, the backbone of the modern DevOps environment, and StackPath offers them as part of its edge compute services. From any of the edge PoPs locations in our global network, you can instantly deploy new or additional containers to proactively reduce latency while still being able to scale and meet player demand. With each new container, your game’s flexibility and adaptability grows. Because the size of your audience can fluctuate for many reasons, StackPath uses a pay as you go model to make sure you are only paying for what you are actually using.
Need a little more control and power? You can also explore virtual machines and serverless scripting options. Both will also help you accelerate updates to games, and still protect your bottom line.
If you are looking for a way to use platform automation to continuously collect feedback during your initial launch, and beyond, as part of your DevOps practices, StackPath’s real-time analytics, via our APIs, will allow you to quickly observe traffic patterns and overall performance. Additionally, and you’ll be able to see how and what types of attacks are being mitigated by using StackPaths WAF.
To take things a step further, because gaming servers are the cornerstone of the gaming technology ecosystem, we offer service monitoring to keep a watchful eye on your edge compute instances or other backend infrastructure from over 30 nodes around the world.
As alluded to above, StackPath’s edge is an API driven platform, so all the capabilities mentioned earlier are all readily available through our API. With this approach, users retain complete control over their account, sites, and all the services they’re using. You can even use StackPath fully integrated, responsive RESTful API to automate deployments, updates, and your analytics as part of your DevOps practices. For more detailed information on the API, take a look at the overview documentation on our developer portal.
If you are looking to continuously improve your time to market with new updates, a crucial part of remaining competitive in the world of video game development, the principals and practice of DevOps is a great place to start. And, once it’s time to send your updates out into the world, edge computing will help you deliver everything more speed, control, and security each and every time. If you haven’t looked carefully at one of both of these tools before, just remember,
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
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