We here at GameSpy have been hunkered down bringing connected gaming to the masses for over 10 years now. We’ve dealt with many technical challenges along the way, some of which were successful out the gates while others required us to rethink our design, architecture, and infrastructure.
By now you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Who the heck are you?” So, let me introduce myself. My name is Mike Ruangutai and I’m the lead code geek here at GameSpy Technologies. More specifically, I manage the engineering team responsible for the connected gaming services powering the thousand or so titles to date. Like many of you, technology fascinates me and I’ve dabbled in many flavors of it throughout the years. Moving from C++ to the early incarnations of Java and J2EE to .NET and now to Ruby, NoSQL and all manner of open source technologies.
So, back to GameSpy. Let’s start with where we are today …
This may sound heretical to some of you, but we’ve primarily been – and still are – a Microsoft shop running the various flavors of .NET, SQL Server, and Windows Server. That isn’t to say we haven’t been successful with the platform, we have. They’ve got great products that address the technology needs for thousands of organizations.
But …
Looking at the technology landscape today, we find that our needs align closer to the likes of Netflix, Twitter, and other big data/big traffic shops. We service nearly 9 billion API requests per month and we’ve got gobs of data coming into our infrastructure daily. And like those guys, we continually hit the scalability and availability wall where Microsoft has failed to innovate effectively. So what is a technology shop to do? As you may have guessed, we find ourselves embracing “the always innovative” open source community.
Great. So what does all this mean?
Well, we’re going to start using this blog to retell the lessons that we’ve learned on the Microsoft stack, as well as document our evolution to the new world for all to see. In the hopper we’ve got Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, MongoDB, Hadoop, Chef, Netty, Play Framework … the list goes on and on. We’ve put some of these technologies into production and we’re happy to impart any knowledge and insight gained to our engineering compatriots.
Stay tuned! The party has just started.