SE I present you the cloud !

[Swimcito]

Hello, SE

So, you could not get physical servers ....

I present you....

-Amazon Web Services.
-Azure Cloud
-Oracle Cloud
-Google Cloud
-VMWare Cloud

You could just do temporary new servers, there and then do a migration to inhouse/physical servers.

This is really lazy from your Cloud Architecture team (if you even have one)

[Rhysati]

So you know how you get these ideas sometimes that seem like a really good idea, then you find out that everyone else has already thought of that exact thing long before you did? This is one of those that hasn't reached its conclusion for you yet.

[LittleImp]

People that think this is a realistic solution have virtually zero understanding of cloud computing, or what it means to maintain a service on the scale of this game.

[NegativeS]

Man, why don't more people think of that?

Oh wait, it's because it's prohibitively expensive or simply not feasible for the desired scale.

[ExKage]

Man, why don't more people think of that?

Oh wait, it's because it's prohibitively expensive or simply not feasible for the desired scale.

Yeah why didn't more people like those at Square Enix working on the game think of that?

You mean, they did?

They did!

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/443994

[Akiudo]

Yeah why didn't more people like those at Square Enix working on the game think of that?

You mean, they did?

They did!

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/443994

and they came to the conclusion that it was not feasible, to quote:

In the past, we partnered with a major company to experiment with switching to cloud servers. However, from a server cost and reliability perspective, we concluded that it was unlikely.

and before the next guy comes up and says "see ? they mentioned costs, i knew it they are just cheapskates" sorry to tell you but this is still a business at the end of the day, unless you want either sub prices to rise or money to be cut elsewhere (which will mean game development) than yea, of course the extra costs coming with things like this have to be taken into account. furthermore even if costs where a non issue they also mentioned reliability problems, which isn't unrealistic when talking about a game of this scale

[Komarimono]

and they came to the conclusion that it was not feasible, to quote:

In the past, we partnered with a major company to experiment with switching to cloud servers. However, from a server cost and reliability perspective, we concluded that it was unlikely.

and before the next guy comes up and says "see ? they mentioned costs, i knew it they are just cheapskates" sorry to tell you but this is still a business at the end of the day, unless you want either sub prices to rise or money to be cut elsewhere (which will mean game development) than yea, of course the extra costs coming with things like this have to be taken into account. furthermore even if costs where a non issue they also mentioned reliability problems, which isn't unrealistic when talking about a game of this scale

That and cloud based MMO's, one to exist so far, has very very poor latency when things get active. And that MMO has infinite server resources, yet fails when it comes to reliability and latency let alone large loads like mass PvP.

[Catwho]

My office investigated using AWS for our application once.

It would require:

* Rewriting the entire code base
* Retooling the entire architecture
* A crapton of security problems since our software is required to be locked behind a VPN (less of an issue for a public MMO, but still something that has to be considered)
* Using a different database (we're in the process of switching now but back then we weren't ready)

We're still looking into it, but the amount of work it would require wasn't worth it for us. And it is a LOT of work.


An MMO, or any program really, has to be built from the ground to work on AWS or Azure. Spinning up extra instances on the fly is already done within the server infrastructure of the current XIV data centers, but it still has a maximum cap (see: Raubhan Ex.)

[Sotaris]

My office investigated using AWS for our application once.

It would require:

* Rewriting the entire code base
* Retooling the entire architecture
* A crapton of security problems since our software is required to be locked behind a VPN (less of an issue for a public MMO, but still something that has to be considered)
* Using a different database (we're in the process of switching now but back then we weren't ready)

We're still looking into it, but the amount of work it would require wasn't worth it for us. And it is a LOT of work.


An MMO, or any program really, has to be built from the ground to work on AWS or Azure. Spinning up extra instances on the fly is already done within the server infrastructure of the current XIV data centers, but it still has a maximum cap (see: Raubhan Ex.)

"b-but its the cloud!"

[Naiw]

My office investigated using AWS for our application once.

It would require:

* Rewriting the entire code base
* Retooling the entire architecture
* A crapton of security problems since our software is required to be locked behind a VPN (less of an issue for a public MMO, but still something that has to be considered)
* Using a different database (we're in the process of switching now but back then we weren't ready)

We're still looking into it, but the amount of work it would require wasn't worth it for us. And it is a LOT of work.


An MMO, or any program really, has to be built from the ground to work on AWS or Azure. Spinning up extra instances on the fly is already done within the server infrastructure of the current XIV data centers, but it still has a maximum cap (see: Raubhan Ex.)

Thats what you need to do to take full adventage of the cloud, just hosting whatever software that is cloud unaware is no problem thats what virtual machines are for and why cloud providers offer them.
”Take full adventage” = reap the benefits of reduced hosting cost.