How The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) use AWS.
Cloud computing is technology by which we can get personal virtual powerful laptops easily.it is possible through various companies like AWS , GCP , Alibaba . As a start-up if we do not want to spend huge amount for infrastructure or technical guys who maintain infrastructure we can use Cloud computing .
AWS(Amazon Web services) is one of most successful company which cover most of market share in public cloud computing . Top companies like Netflix , Dropbox and many more use its services . It provide storage as a service , computing as a service (EC2) , elastic search ..
One of the which shift its services to AWS Aurora is The Pokémon
Launched in Japan in 1996, Pokémon has become one of the most popular entertainment brands worldwide. People of all ages — hundreds of millions of them — enjoy training and battling Pokémon creatures through the Pokémon Trading Card Game and the Pokémon GO mobile game.
Why The Pokémon shift to AWS Aurora?
After the launch of Pokémon GO in 2016, the number of users requiring access to this system increased to more than 300 million in two years. The company decided to migrate to a fully managed solution to free up time and resources to focus on strategic initiatives.
Roles of engineers in The Pokémon?
In Bellevue, Washington, engineers at The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) are responsible for making sure Pokémon fans outside of Asia can track their achievements through full-featured user accounts(with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and General Data Protection Regulation.)
What data The Pokémon want to store?
“Our user profile system is largely two sets of data: users for Pokémon GO and users for the Pokémon Trading Card Game,” says Jeff Webb, development manager at TPCi. “User profiles from different play types require different processes and maintenance, but they all live in the Pokémon Trainer Club system. Because of the complexity and volume of data we’re dealing with, database scalability and reliability are absolutely critical to delivering a great user experience.”
Previous services used by Pokémon ?
The company hosted its database and memory-caching system on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), with Elastic Load Balancing managing traffic and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object storage. “We chose our previous NoSQL database because of its fast lookups,” notes Webb. “However, we found out that achieving the speed we wanted required maintaining many indices and managing many complex nodes — more than 300 at one point.”
Management issue faced by company
Keeping nodes running smoothly was challenging. When index or database nodes became unavailable, it increased latency. If a Memcached node went down, users couldn’t log in at all. When primary data nodes failed, the team had to drop everything to rebuild them while the system operated on backup nodes. After years of daily management issues, exacerbated by the massive influx of Pokémon GO users, TPCi decided to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its fully managed database services.
Solution from AWS
Less time managing databases frees time for innovation. The company is planning to use serverless computing, containers, and microservices for even greater efficiency and performance. As its services continue to improve, TPCi empowers millions of people around the world to enjoy the Pokémon universe on demand.
