The author | jia ningyu source | alibaba cloud native public number
In Mihayou’s office block, there is a conference room reserved for Aliyun engineers.
This year, is the second yuan culture company founded nine years, Mihayou and Aliyun’s friendship, also has eight years.
Liu Wei, president of Meha You, still remembers the scene when Dr. Wang Jian arrived at the meha You office with eight company executives and the responsible team many years ago. That day, there were only 30 or so cubicles in the small office space that Miha had rented, and not even a conference room was big enough for the dozen or so visitors.
At that time, Mihayou was not long established, ali Cloud was still in the initial stage of external services, the two young brothers came together by chance, groping for each other to move forward.
That day, Dr. Wang Jian said such a paragraph: “If the customer sat in the plane flying in the sky, we only look on the ground, it is very easy to break down. To do it, we fly in the sky with our customers.”
When he left, Dr. Wang Jian wrote his mobile phone number to Liu Wei. Any questions, he said, call me directly.
Many years passed, but fortunately no such call was made. And Alibaba core system has already achieved 100% on the cloud, verified that sentence “and customers sit on the same plane”.
Time flew by. In September 2020, in the eighth year of parallel between Miha Travel and Ali Cloud, this two-dimensional cultural company launched its latest representative work “Original God”, and the five regional services in the world are fully loaded on Ali Cloud.
By the end of the year, Protogod was a dark horse in the game industry, gaining momentum.
On November 30, Google awarded Game of the Year on Google Play 2020 to Protogod; Just a day later, Apple gave Protogod the App Store 2020 iPhone Game of the Year.
This may be the first time a Chinese game has won the title of “double Crown”.
In this year, Ali Cloud has already grown from the little brother to the leader of cloud computing industry, becoming the digital base of many industries and providing services for many Chinese game enterprises.
Start with “believe.
Back in 2012, Meha Had just released a two-dimensional game called Collapse School.
Back then, the mobile game market was still in its infancy, and there were very few anime game developers. Look around the App Store, and there were very few mobile anime games. But in miha heart, the future of the game market, there must be a place for domestic animation.
Coincidentally, the industry phase of cloud computing is somewhat similar to anime games. As a nascent technology, China’s cloud computing industry has just taken off, but Both Miha You and Aliyun have a dream about the future.
No one knows how the future will arrive. Believing is the only way.
In the traditional IT era, game companies buy their own servers, build their own computer rooms, and configure operation and maintenance personnel. The heavy model of spending so much money to get started kept many entrepreneurs with ideas out of the game industry, which at that time was almost exclusively the preserve of big companies.
Cloud computing offers a new opportunity to skip all the upfront INVESTMENT in IT infrastructure and tap into the power of the cloud with the click of a mouse on a web page. It’s almost the perfect product for an entrepreneurial team like Mihayou.
When “Beng1” was launched, two cloud servers of Ali Cloud were used. A small attempt opened the “journey on the cloud” of Miha Travel.
Looking back, Mihayou can be said to represent a generation of Internet start-ups. Born in the cloud, all business is in the cloud. It is the first to feel the characteristics of cloud computing, such as high flexibility, high concurrency and low cost, and can be called “cloud native enterprise”.
It is the rapid growth of this generation of “cloud native enterprises” that promotes the development and popularity of cloud computing in China.
In 2016, Meha released its third game, Collapse 3. But at this point, Mihayou still had only two operations staff — almost unthinkable in the days of traditional home-built server rooms.
As an early adopter of cloud computing, Mihalu stepped on potholes.
“Problems are hard to avoid, the key is to solve them.” “Recalls Liu Xiao, miha’s technical director.
As the years passed, Mihalyou gradually grew up, from three people to dozens of people, and then to hundreds or thousands of people. It was no longer a small team without a conference room.
Mehayu also reserved a conference room for Aliyun engineers, telling them to “come and use whenever you want.”
“Via” Ali Cloud, safe sea
At first, Meha tour was small and encountered some setbacks in its efforts to expand overseas.
“Fortunately, it was a small scale and there were not many users, so the negative impact of the incident could be controlled. If it’s a game on the scale of Collapse 3 or Protogod, the damage is incalculable.” “So it should be said that for most game companies, the cloud is the best choice, no one.”
In 2016, The miha Tour officially started to go to sea. In the overseas service area, Collapse 3 initially chose an overseas cloud service provider, but suffered several DDoS attacks by hackers, including one that even affected users’ normal access.
This is a very malicious method of network attack: the hacker sends a large number of requests to the server in a short time, causing network congestion and preventing normal users from accessing it.
To take a more graphic example, a restaurant with a seating capacity of 100 people opens, and the restaurant next door is not happy about it, so it hires 150 hooligans to swarm into the restaurant and take up all the space by sitting and not eating. As a result, ordinary guests who wanted to eat couldn’t get in.
In order to defend against attacks, Mihayou also purchased additional security protection services, but the situation was not improved in time due to technical support and communication efficiency issues.
In the worry, Mihayou thought of Ali Cloud, and Ali cloud engineers together, came up with a method — the player request first through Ali cloud high defense IP, after traffic cleaning, and then back to the original machine room, so as to resist DDoS attacks of hundreds of GB.
The problem that had plagued Meha yu for so long was solved in one fell swoop.
Time has come to 2017. After several years of efforts, Ali Cloud also built more and more infrastructure around the world. At the end of that year, Ali Cloud had 17 regions and 53 available regions all over Asia, Europe and the United States.
For Mihayou, now would be the best time to move all “collapse 3” to Aliyun.
Later, when planning “The Original God”, Mihayou did not hesitate, “the original God” global resources, all directly on Ali Cloud. Up to now, once encountered overseas hacker attack, did not appear on “original god”.
The Original God, an unprecedented challenge
“The Original God” is a great challenge that Meha You and Aliyun face together.
How ambitious is the original God plan? This isn’t just an open-world game — it means huge maps and character graphics, complex level design, and a storyline. What is more difficult is that Miha Wants to make a multi-platform, global synchronous public test game, that is, PS4, iOS, Android, PC and other game platforms, and the five global service areas at the same time, the same service area data communication, seamless connection.
For example, when you play Protogod on your phone and switch to your computer, the gameplay and progress are seamless.
And, in order to better online game experience, Miha swim to adopt “chase service”.
Most game companies use a “split server” approach, where there are several servers in one area, and more servers are added after a certain number of players are reached. But “access” puts all users in a large area on the same server cluster, and the number of online players increases dramatically.
That said, by the time Protogod goes live, the PCU (maximum number of online players) could be far greater than daily estimates, with a global, full-service audience pouring in.
If Mihayou can design such a product, then, in the face of such high concurrency, high performance, high flexibility of the technical requirements, ali Cloud can support?
Some people feel uneasy, but Meha You as always chose Aliyun. This trust is rooted in years of cooperation.
Miha you are too familiar with Ali Cloud. In recent years, they have seen Ali Cloud support Taobao Tmall through double 11. Every year, the peak value of Ali Cloud support will be higher.
“Although we are not an e-commerce company, the demand for high concurrency in games and technology is very similar. Judging from Double 11, we believe Aliyun’s technical capability is sufficient.”
They also see aliyun making rapid progress. In 2017, Aliyun launched its own PolarDB database, which can provide minute-level configuration upgrade and downgrade, second-level fault recovery, global data consistency and data backup disaster recovery services.
For Mihayu, backing up data took hours and the game had to be played for more than an hour while using an older database. On PolarDB, the backup can be reduced to the second level, greatly reducing the time of data backup and improving the efficiency of version update.
In July 2020, Primordia entered its final beta phase on PS4, iOS, Android, and PC.
Welcome to tiwat
Aliyun’s engineers were back in the familiar conference room. In the final two months, they became residents again, “working on The Original God as ali’s own project.”
Ali Yun’s accumulated capabilities over the years have become the technical basis for the realization of the grand vision of The Original God.
For example, what engineers call “one architecture, globally deployed” resource assurance capabilities. To put it simply, ali Cloud adopts the same architecture and provides the same performance experience from the base layer to a set of architecture products, including cloud server, network resources, storage, security and database, on different service nodes around the world.
This provides the basic guarantee for the “global simultaneous service” requirement of The Original God, which means that The Meha Tour only needs to build one architecture around the world, instead of changing the architecture for each service area.
At the same time, the same performance ensures that the five regions of the world can give players a unified game experience, without “some features in certain areas and others missing”.
Another example is PolarDB’s ability to meet the needs of high performance game database of Primordius and reduce the investment of Miha in IT operation and maintenance by virtue of the perfect product packaging form, allowing all the staff to focus on the game itself. “We focused on the design of the game, and basically handed over all the basic IT work to Aliyun.” Liu Xiao concluded.
This is ali cloud in the field of the biggest comprehensive combat. Although some requirements of Ali Cloud technology in The Original God have been practiced in different customers and fields, it is the first time for such a project to challenge all the difficult actions at one time.
When it goes live, Protogod will be the world’s largest cloud game in terms of global deployments and preorders — a fact that became a reality a few months later.
So even the “thermal migration” that Ariyun is familiar with needs to be upgraded in The Original God.
Live migration means that the running status of the entire VM can be completely saved and quickly restored to the original or other hardware platforms without users noticing any difference in usage.
In layman’s terms, this is similar to the car driving on the highway, the engine alarm, need to stop to complete the replacement.
If “changing the engine of a car” is a general situation, in The Original God, it is a process of changing the engine of a super-large airplane in the sky. And, because of the game’s high requirements for stability, the replacement process, the “plane” can not have the slightest jitter and offset.
Demand from mihajlovic passed back to the meeting room to visit ali cloud flying park, from the game business is passed to the business of virtualization, engineers from different departments together to method, for a system through intelligent operations on the underlying performance adjustment, implementation in ultra-high QPS, high CPU and memory load scenarios of nondestructive “AI heat transfer method.
“AI heat migration” has been applied to Protogod, and so far, it’s been very effective.
In the last two months, preorders for Primordial God went up, and so did demand for servers. Finally, after dozens of server expansions and overnight stress tests, the engineers felt that, this time, it was done.
On September 28, “Original God” global synchronous public test opened, 10 o ‘clock, officially launched.
In that conference room, Alicloud’s 20-plus engineers glued their eyes to a large screen of indices, one peak after another.
Eventually, PCU peaked at a number that was higher than anyone expected, but the cloud held up. Just like the countless pressure tests we’ve done before, smooth and calm.
Outside, the name of the conference room was pasted: Tiwat.
On The land of Tiwat, those chosen by the gods would be given the “eye of the God”, and these people would be called primordial gods.
2020 Cloud Native Combat Summit is about to open
Mihayou is the first generation of cloud native enterprises, is the best sample of cloud native enterprises, its vigorous growth path on the cloud can give more enterprises to the cloud native reference. The era of cloud native has quietly arrived, and more and more enterprises have seen the bright spot of cloud native. How to implement cloud native to generate actual business value has become a common proposition to be urgently solved by enterprises.
On December 23, 2020, Ali Cloud will hold the “2020 Cloud native Combat Summit” with the theme of “Cloud native accelerating enterprise digital Innovation and Upgrading” in Beijing International Trade Hotel. At that time, technical managers of many leading enterprises in the industry will attend the conference to discuss the best posture of cloud native landing with the majority of developers, share the status quo, challenges and innovation practices of enterprises in different industries when landing, and exchange experience of cloud native pit avoidance.
Click on the link: 7e.7-event.cn/7e/seasonfa… , sign up for “2020 Cloud native Combat Summit”, learn more about cloud native enterprise stories!