Hao Fang: Electronic gaming platform based on the "cloud" and set up

If you are a video game enthusiast, mention Hao Fang (Shanghai Hao Fang Online Information Technology Co., Ltd.) you must not be unfamiliar. On average, there are 700,000 of players from all over the country to linger in the game space created by the Hao Fang, they are more willing to the country's most popular, the largest electronic competitive operating platform as a comfortable, free "leisure Inn." Decent word-of-mouth and user loyalty, as well as more and more gamers of the favor, is the Hao side for many years the accumulation of valuable wealth, but also its development and expansion of the fundamental.

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However, the possession of this wealth is not once and for all, players demand changes, peer competition pressure increase ... A series of new problems test the management intelligence of the Hao Fang, which also brings great pressure to the IT team led by the CTO Xu Channel-How can the Hao provide more convenient, perfect and attractive service to the players? What kind of strong support is needed at the technical level?

It's time to change.

"Hao Fang at the same time the number of online, geographically dispersed, but also faced with a very complex network environment." Xu Channel, said that the biggest feature of electronic sports in terms of speed and quality, if the network I/O pressure can not be effectively alleviated, only time delay is enough to reduce the interest of gamers, and this is only the Hao side faced with a lot of pressure.

The same is the operation of the network gaming platform, but the operation of electronic athletics is more difficult than the management of large-scale online games. Online Games Players Login game interface, will be automatically guided into the preset good server, the use of relatively stable, basic will not appear to replace the server phenomenon. Electronic athletics is different, a war generally lasts about half an hour, after the end of the game players will often choose to play items. According to statistics, an electronic competitive user on average every day to change three or four servers to get content, in the evening to early morning, holidays, and new games online, resource dynamic adjustment is more frequent, traditional hardware infrastructure operation management method is difficult to meet business needs.

Complexity always has to be shielded on the operator's own side. In order to improve customer satisfaction, Hao Fang in the past had to adopt tactics, depending on the location of the players, by a large number of staff in the background for its close to the server group, the quality of service was guaranteed. But this approach is not only inefficient, but also expensive, and the availability, stability and scalability of the entire platform are tested. Xu Channel said that the Hao side has never stopped looking for a scientific way to solve the link problem, effective management of the increasingly large server equipment.

Everything has changed because of "cloud computing". "Hao Fang is a technology-oriented enterprise, four or five years ago from the beginning of virtualization, continuing to focus on the early cloud computing technology, 2008 has been in-depth discussion, digest some of the existing experience." "For Hu Haofeng, this new technology with obvious advantages in resource dynamic adjustment and flexible delivery has the characteristics of loose coupling, which is consistent with the architectural support required by business objectives." However, it is easy to identify the target, find the most suitable path but not easy, how to make full use of the advantages of cloud computing to improve the quality of their business has become an in-depth research topic.

Making clouds together

In the construction of corporate cloud, the competitive platform to build its exploration process, the Hao side and Intel walked together, before the two sides have been on the virtualization and other technical issues for many years. After working together, the two sides, based on the Intel Xeon Server platform, incorporate Intel's hardware-assisted virtualization technology and management solutions to create a cloud-like business model, gradually put the competitive platform on the corporate cloud infrastructure and decouple the dependencies of the upper business and underlying hardware resources, so that The business management and resource management of Hao Fang are integrated into the unified and flexible management framework, which is independent and organically combined.

Further, the Hao side through the game template corresponding game instances of the game server to effectively manage the case, the Administrator in accordance with user needs, based on existing templates to achieve rapid allocation or recovery of resources. Once the user scale has changed dramatically, the administrator also no longer have to manually adjust the physical link, only adjust the deployment parameters can be automatically adjusted resources, the background staff no longer put too much energy into the management of the complex topology of the server, decentralized data centers are easily achieved across the region management- Many of the previous complexities have been blocked by cloud computing. This flexible and automatic management method is immediate, Hao Fang realized the expected scientific link management, the user needs to achieve a rapid response, maintenance costs are greatly reduced, which further strengthened the core competitiveness of the Hao side.

In the process of cooperation, the Intel Software Partners Division provides a professional cloud computing solution Service support to the Hao side, from the project requirements analysis, technical training, hardware selection, the reference implementation of the infrastructure, to the best practices, sample code, and so on, the whole process of in-depth cooperation, and jointly completed the cloud computing platform design, planning, Implementation and testing work.

Help expand new Business opportunities

The new platform for the Hao square structure for the future of the foundation, Hao Fang has enough strength to look to the longer term, mining potential business opportunities. According to Xu Strait, the Hao side has been ahead of competitors to launch a quick engagement project, "before the war is very complex, the game content and war" room "are designated, physical server is fixed, flexibility is very poor, and now successfully launched about the post-war period, the Hao side backstage can automatically dynamic and reasonable allocation of resources, This has been difficult to achieve in the past. ”

A brand-new Guild athletics platform is also in the planning, according to introduce, Hao side will with domestic network game operator open cooperation. Attract more games Guild to enter and participate in the competition, but this kind of operation pattern also needs the flexible resource dispatch. It is obvious that cloud computing has played a fundamental supporting role in opening up new business opportunities. Relying on "corporate cloud", Hao Fang has the ability to improve service levels while exploring more profitable models.

From the cloud to taste the sweetness of the Hao side did not stop, "by virtue of the vast number of users, Hao Fang can analyze the value of the operator's network link optimization to provide data reference, and small enterprises are difficult to do." We are willing to make such an attempt with Intel, but also want to let the application in the network layer of problems encountered through cloud computing technology to solve the dynamic, to avoid peer enterprises are repeatedly doing similar optimization of labor, this is Hao Fang to drive the development of China's cloud computing to do some work! Xu Channel said.