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Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...
Posted By: stabbim <jfollmann@gmail.com>Date: 10/31/12 2:55 p.m.

In Response To: Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship... (XXLChicken)


:
: http://news.yahoo.com/halo-4-first-major-game-backed-windows-azure-090032137.html

: An article about Halo 4 and Windows Azure. As a guy with no knowledge of
: cloud computing and Windows Azure, can someone please explain to me the
: benefits of having Halo 4 backed by Azure other than allowing for upgrades
: being made to the network without bringing it down?

They tried to say it in the article briefly, but I'll see if I can expand:

Halo 4 is going to be a big seller, to say the least. If you've ever tried to play a REALLY popular game online right when it comes out, you may have experienced problems connecting, maybe for the first few minutes, maybe even the first day or two in some cases (note that this doesn't ALWAYS happen, it's just fairly common). Often the reason for this is that the huge demand on their servers exceeds those servers' capacity to respond.* This results in things either happening extremely slowly, or not happening at all. The devs have to quickly add capacity (which probably means putting in more servers) to compensate.

Naturally, the devs will have tried to guess at the total load before launch, and tried to build their server farm/data center to be adequate. But this requires money, so they can't just say "let's build the most massive farm ever and totally overshoot the mark just to be safe." Rather, they try as hard as they can to get enough capacity within budget. But sometimes their estimation of their need is wrong, which leads to load problems, and they have to scramble to compensate with more capacity.

The idea here is that because 343's Azure setup is really just a bunch of virtual servers,** it's easy as pie to spin up more of them at a moment's notice, thereby providing more capacity.***

The other benefit was also alluded to briefly in the article but could use some fleshing out: Let's say you're a developer with a traditional farm, and you get into that launch over-capacity situation, and you build up a bunch more equipment to handle the load. A couple weeks or months later, the demand is going to drop off. You now have maybe 1/4 or 1/2 of the traffic you did at launch (I'm making up numbers here, but you get the idea), but all those servers are still there. At worst, they're all still running, sucking up power, IT staff's time (maintenance and such), and space. At best, you have to tear them down and get rid of them. Whereas with Azure, you just shut down a few of the virtual servers.

* Halo's gameplay occurs as peer-to-peer traffic, straight from one XBox to another. There are still servers involved in setting up the initial sessions between players, though. Plus, in Halo's case, things like stat tracking, file shares, etc.

** Machines which only exist as software, running on top of an actual physical server - on a platform like Azure, a client like 343 will probably have many virtual machines running, all spread across Microsoft's (probably gargantuan) physical server farms.

*** Note that the virtual servers are still running on physical hardware somewhere, so there is still some finite limit. But it's likely that Azure has more physical capacity on tap than any single thing, even as big as Halo 4, will need.

Message Index



Replies:

You thought War Games took place on a ship...Arithmomaniac 10/31/12 1:38 p.m.
     Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...XXLChicken 10/31/12 1:48 p.m.
           Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...JDQuackers 10/31/12 2:30 p.m.
           Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...stabbim 10/31/12 2:55 p.m.
           Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...Jironimo 10/31/12 3:11 p.m.
                 Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...Jironimo 10/31/12 3:13 p.m.
           The cloud is a future I'm excited for!serpx 10/31/12 4:27 p.m.
     Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...Ragashingo 10/31/12 2:47 p.m.



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