SE Dont be afraid of the cloud ...

[Swimcito]

Hi, basically ....


I know that you guys have your own servers and stuff. And it is the smart business decision, to have them on premises ...

However, comes Endwalker launch, the influx of wow players, returning ff14 players, etc...

Should procurement of new servers go wrong ....

Do not be afraid of renting space... that is while the heat subsides...

You can always migrate later on to your own servers.

[Larirawiel]

Maybe they use already a private cloud architecure.


And maybe renting more cloud space will not help them. If their server software cannot scale horizontally then more cloud space would be pretty useless for them.


Cheers

[Catwho]

Maybe they use already a private cloud architecure.


And maybe renting more cloud space will not help them. If their server software cannot scale horizontally then more cloud space would be pretty useless for them.

Cheers

The latter is a pretty important thing. Each "data center" is really a series of clustered world servers that communicate with other data center servers, such as the lobby server and the instance servers, and of course the server hosting the database. They already spin up and collapse instances on the fly.

AWS and Azure are great for turnkey solutions where an entire application can exist in its virtualized instance, but for a complex system that has to juggle tens of thousands of database connections and communications with existing hardware based servers, it would quickly develop bottlenecks and slow down. The lag is already bad enough with server snapshots every half second. Adding another layer in there would increase it substantially.

They'd have better luck if they asked the other companies they are colocated with to borrow any unused hardware. At least it could talk with the other servers in the data center that way.

[Kes13a]

another thing to remember, is that whatever company provides the service, then has to have a reliable connection history and be able to guarantee that people can connect to the server.

I am sure, for a gaming company that has an mmo, there would be nothing worse than a connection issue they have zero control over.

[Jeeqbit]

Some people actually assume SE use a cloud but if you follow the maintenance and other details of the game closely then you can see that's not true. They are physical server racks holding a bunch of areas on each machine.

[SannaR]

They actually looked at the cloud. At the time it didn't seem to be able to meet their needs in the time and manner that they needed. Yoshida said they are willing to look back at the cloud if things change. I.E if it becomes affordable for what they want to do while they work on the bigger server project they've been working on. That we probably wont see the fruit of til 7.0 I'm guessing.

[Swimcito]

another thing to remember, is that whatever company provides the service, then has to have a reliable connection history and be able to guarantee that people can connect to the server.

I am sure, for a gaming company that has an mmo, there would be nothing worse than a connection issue they have zero control over.

Well i hate to promote what is now kind of a duopoly..

But AWS and Azure are extremely reliable ...

Also i am not sure about a permanent solution.. i am just thinking it from a "emergency" situation, you can dump some juice there while a permanent solution is found or demand subsides ...

Also that way is more scalable, as going big on hardware now, and should demand subside, they would have extra muscle than needed... whereas the cloud option, if demand goes down, you can just migrate to on premises and remove the extra juice that you used.

[technole]

Do you realize clouds utilize data centers?

NTT is doing just fine hosting FFXIV, and they have a pretty darn good backhaul to their Sacremento data center.

If anything some east coast players would prefer they also host FFXIV also at their Texas data center so they get better pings to the game.

[Arzalis]

If you want an example of a game that runs well on the cloud, look at GW2. Regardless of how you feel about the gameplay or whatever, their infrastructure is insanely good. The game doesn't even have downtime for major patches, they just phase out old outdated instances slowly when people zone or logoff.

I'm sure the FFXIV devs do the best with what they have. That said, it's easy to look at things like housing and conclude they would benefit from at least a hybrid approach to their infrastructure. Granted, there's almost definitely a lot of work to implement that sort of thing.