Supercell Case Study

The Challenge

“When Supercell launched,” says Sami Yliharju, services lead at Supercell, “the founders wanted to create a company where the focus would be on the best people making the best games.” Designing specifically for mobile lets the developers concentrate on creating the best experience for gamers—and working in small development teams helps, too. Each game team is unique, but usually includes a lead, a game designer, a game tester, an artist, a server engineer, and a game programmer. Supporting technical teams are of similar size, but have a different structure depending on their responsibilities.

These technical teams at Supercell needed not only cloud computing services that were easy to use, powerful, and reliable, but also a set of services that matched their requirements for high-volume games performance, scalability, and rapid growth. “Similarly, we need a powerful infrastructure for running our data pipelines, analytics platform and web offerings. Choosing Amazon Web Services was an easy decision, and we’ve been using its cloud technologies since day one,” says Yliharju.

Why Amazon Web Services

The Benefits

Using AWS helps Supercell keep its focus on what it does best: developing games that keep its players happy. “Since the launch of our three games, our player base has expanded at an incredible pace,” says Yliharju. “We don’t have to worry about being able to manage our infrastructure to match our growth—AWS tools make it easy for us.”

This scalability has allowed the company to expand into China, which is home to one quarter of all Internet users and represents a huge market opportunity. “The size of our infrastructure would be very hard to maintain with a physical on-premises setup, especially as the success of game releases is not predictable,” says Yliharju.

Using Amazon Kinesis, Supercell can process data up 45 billion in-game events a day. “We collect data because our games don’t stay in the top-ten lists automatically. Success has to be earned by listening to the community and the players, providing additional features, and balancing the game to make it fair for everyone. Amazon Kinesis gives our business-critical analytics and dashboard applications the data streams they need, reliably and without delays,” Yliharju says. “Amazon Kinesis does a lot of the heavy lifting, and lets Supercell focus on delivering games that delight players worldwide.” With this insight, developers can make in-game changes either on the fly or in larger, scheduled updates. This data also provides in-depth information to the Supercell support team, helping it support the player community.

The company also benefits from AWS Enterprise Support. “AWS Support is always available whenever we need it,” Yliharju says. “We particularly like learning about upcoming AWS features and changes in advance from our technical account manager, so we have time to prepare.

“The world of gaming never sleeps. We have a 24/7 audience,” Yliharju concludes. “We owe every player a great experience, and AWS is our platform to make that happen.”

About Supercell

Finland-based Supercell, founded in 2010 by six game-industry veterans, is one of the fastest-growing social game companies in the world.

Benefits of AWS

• Focuses on developing games that keeps players happy instead of managing infrastructure
• Expands to new regions
• Processes up to 45 billion in-game events every day

AWS Services Used

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. 

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Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Amazon EMR is the industry leading cloud-native big data platform, allowing teams to process vast amounts of data quickly, and cost-effectively at scale.

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Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

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Amazon S3 Glacier

Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive are a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost Amazon S3 cloud storage classes for data archiving and long-term backup.

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