⚡How gaming is reinvented using MongoDB ⚡
MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Server Side Public License.
How MongoDB is modernizing legacy workloads?
Data modernization is here to stay, and DataSwitch and MongoDB are leading the way forward. Research strongly indicates that the future of Database Management System(DBMS) market is in the cloud, and the ideal way to shift from an outdated, legacy DBMS to a modern, cloud-friendly data warehouse is through data modernization.
There are a few key factors driving the shift. Increasingly, companies need to store and manage unstructured data in the cloud-enabled system, as opposed to legacy DBMS which is only designed for structured data. Moreover, the amount of data generated by a business is increasing at a rate of 55% to 65% everyt year and the major of it is unstructured data. A modernized database provides many benefits in performance, scalibility and cost optimization. It also provides a foundation for improving business value through informed decision-making. Moreover, cloud enabled database support greater agility so we can easily upgrade current applications and build new ones faster to meet customer demand.
Why MongoDB?
MongoDB is built for modern application developers and for the cloud era. As a general purpose, document oriented, distributed database, it provides high productivity and can handle huge volume of data. The document database stores data in JSON doc and is built on a scale-out architecture that is optimal for any kind of developer.
MongoDB advantages and features include:
- Rich JSON document
- Powerful Query Language
- Multi-cloud Data Distribution
- Better security of data
- Quick storage and retrieval of data
- Capacity for huge volume of data
- High performance and efficiency
How gaming is reinvented?
Modernization is the key to success in this competitive industry. Choosing a modern database like MongoDB for gaming modernization just made sense. Today, Lucid Sight holds two major titles: MLB Champions and CSC (Crypto Space Commander). CSC is an online, multiplayer, role-playing game which includes a player-owned economy space. Upon partnering with Star Trek, digital assets in CSC — like the Starship Enterprise — have sold for $30,000 USD. MLB Champions reinvents the baseball card by allowing users to own authentic, collectible baseball player figurines and project them from an app on your phone using augmented reality. Virtual figures or players are tied to their real-world teams so users earn rewards for successful live games. These two titles are just a select few of the myriad of games Lucid Sight has launched with their calling card feature of enforced asset management on the ethereum blockchain to support safe and complex transactions.
Now, what happens at the back-end. They run a backend internal tool service called Scarcity Engine which powers the entirety of digital assets system. It takes a game item from the virtual world and puts it onto a blockchain and vice-versa.
Scarcity Engine run its main cluster on MongoDB. There are 3 clusters that are constantly running, but all our games run their own Atlas Project and have their own clusters depending on their needs. They also used Redis for ephemeral storage. Atlas provided Continous Backup System which removed overhead and the need for them and their engineers to worry about reliable backups was a big time saver.
One of the best thing about removing the necessity for database management is being able to contact service and support if there are any issues and have someone else worry about the database running so we can focus on games, our servers, and all the other stuff that’s complex and hard to deal with. They ran Atlas on Google Cloud Platform as they found right set of tools on GCP. GCP provided unmatched App Engine and Compute Engine as well as Access Control which was their need. They were surprised with the efficiency and productivity of Mongo Atlas. They could easily scale-out and scale-in.
Games benefit from MongoDB’s flexibilty because changes are quite frequent and relying on rigit schema is not practical in gaming world.
HARDlight’s first MongoDB powered game was Kingdom Conquest: Dark Empire which was a frictionless launch from the start and gave the engineers their first experiences of MongoDB. It’s a demanding, always-on application that enables constant connection to the internet and shared leaderboards. In the background a 3 shard cluster running on MongoDB Atlas easily scaled to handle the complex loads as millions of gamers joined the race. The database was stable with low latencies and not a single service interruption. All of this resulted in a low stress launch, a happy DevOps team and a very enthusiastic set of gamers.
With MySQL, it had taken multiple game launches to get the database backend right. With MongoDB Atlas, big launches were a success right from the start. That’s no mean feat.
SEGA HARDlight is now expanding its use of MongoDB Atlas to support all new games as they come online. By taking care of the operations, management and scaling, MongoDB Atlas lets HARDlight focus on building and running some of the most iconic games in the world. And doing it with confidence.
Leaf in the Wild: FACEIT Scales to 4m+ Gamers with MongoDB and Cloud Manager, Fuels Major New Partnerships with Industry Leaders
MongoDB is the main database underpinning their platform. They use it to orchestrate services between players, teams, and competitions. All user profiles and tournament data is managed by MongoDB.
On average, each tournament match involves 10 players generating streams of time-series statistics, all of which are written to MongoDB. They use the data they collect in MongoDB to drive sophisticated analytics that track player behavior, engagement, and competitive performances in tools such as Mixpanel and Keen IO.
They initially chose to consume MongoDB as a service from the Compose platform. It was great to get started with, but they quickly outgrew it as users and traffic scaled. So they migrated to their own database instances hosted on AWS, and contracted a 3rd party MongoDB support provider to run the platform with its remote DBA services. But as their growth accelerated, it became clear that they needed more that just reactive troubleshooting to any issues we encountered. Now, they are running MongoDB across two replica sets provisioned on AWS EC2. They use Cloud Manager to configure and deploy new instances, which is super easy and quick for their developers. They use New Relic to provide global oversight across our application stack, and then Cloud Manager for MongoDB-specific low level telemetry. The monitoring data they get from Cloud Manager enables their developers to make more informed choices on query optimization. Its new visual query profiler makes it simple to identify slow running queries, and provides recommendations on how to address them.
- Using the WiredTiger storage engine’s native compression, they have reduced their storage footprint by 50–60%.
- Document level concurrency control has given them outstanding performance advantages. They are able to support tens of thousands of operations per second, with a 70:30 read/write ratio, while substantially reducing the number of MongoDB instances they need to run by around 30%.
MongoDB has been central to their scaling from zero to over 4m users in just 18 months. This growth has given them the capacity to scale their service to support new partnerships for FACEIT with Microsoft Xbox and Twitch.
Expanding to new platforms demonstrates the benefit of MongoDB’s flexible document model. Trying to add game-specific player IDs to existing user profiles without downtime or changes to the codebase when you are tied to a relational database is impossible. The database is flexible enough to adapt and grow as our business continues to expand.
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