Load Balancers and Security for Video Game Development and Live Services

The Challenge of Delivering Games as Live Services

Video game delivery is shifting away from packaged games and toward 24/7 live services with public betas, continuous updates and patches, online multiplayer, streaming, in-line chat and voice communication, and user-generated content. This growth has put enormous stress on the infrastructure and processes for application delivery.

Game developers need to deliver faster, at greater scale, and increasingly with the involvement of the end user. This requires optimized CI/CD pipelines; rapid scale-out of development resources and deployed services across multiple clouds; the ability to handle new media streaming, messaging and game data shared by users; and the means to keep user and transactional data secure.

Game devs need a new solution for application delivery that enables this transition. Snapt Nova is an application delivery platform optimized for the needs of game development, deployment and live service delivery.

Latency, Latency Latency

Industry statistics show that even small delays in end-user experience can result in massive game abandonment.

• Gamers are twice as likely to abandon a game with a network delay of 500 milliseconds or more.
• A 2-second delay in processing transactions can result in 87% abandonment rates.
• Eighty-one percent of gamers abandon a page when it doesn't load immediately.

Nova enables infrastructure best practices for latency reduction, resulting in a better end-user experience.

Run Fast, Run Big

Nova is architected to increase availability, performance and scale.

Nova makes it easy to connect to new nodes and to multiple clouds simultaneously, enabling IT architects to follow best practices in scaling and resilience.

Nova’s autoscaling technology allows you to keep up with demand with no manual operation. Nova will automatically scale-out new ADCs (providing load balancing, acceleration and WAF-based security) as demand increases, or if it detects that resources are constrained or that performance is dropping.

Serve Global Customers

Your customers might come from all over the world. For the best performance, you need to connect them to local resources.

Nova features intelligent DNS addresses that allow global multi-location traffic routing. Nova’s Active-Active Multi-Cloud redundancy routes users intelligently between cloud providers and reroutes users automatically to handle disaster recovery or performance degradations.

Control Costs

Running in multiple clouds and responding to changing demand can result in escalating costs and overprovisioning.

Nova can distribute load between multiple clouds, and easily scale-out resources in the cheapest connected cloud provider and scale-in where resources become more expensive. Nova can also scale-in automatically in response to shrinking user demand – or by predicting periods of lower demand using machine learning and predictive analytics.

Protect Your Services and Players

Games are collecting more user data and processing more transactional data than ever before. Keeping this data and these processes secure is one of your top priorities.

Nova protects your transactional and user data from malicious users and traffic, including DoS, threats, botnets, data leaks and application attacks, so you can provide a trusted experience for your users.

The Nova WAF is centrally managed and uses patent pending near-zero latency communications for immediate ADC node feedback, and then applies ML-enabled predictive analytics and AI-based autonomous decision-making to automatically configure security and send alerts. It provides the most robust ADC security on the market.