Global gaming giant simplifies its architecture and accelerates growth

Founded in 2010, Playtika is a leading gaming company based in Israel and one of the first to offer free-to-play social games on social networks and mobile platforms. In 2021, they had over 35 million users, 3,700 employees worldwide, and went public as the largest-ever IPO for an Israeli-founded company at a valuation of $11B.

Siloed, bloated data infrastructure struggled to support performance and growth

For Playtika’s IT organization, every decision is driven by data and focused on enhancing the user’s playing experience. Team members located in different countries all need to use data to make real-time decisions that support marketing efforts, boost in-game economies, improve the product, customize the game experience, and ensure security for the systems and personal information.

Originally, Playtika had two gaming studios, each with a different game. As they grew to 15 studios over 5 years they discovered that their NoSQL solution was unable to meet the company’s needs for growth, scale, performance, and maintainability. Coronavirus caused further strain on the system with 60% growth in 6 months as users stayed home and played games.

• Inability to meet performance goals

  Needed throughput of at least 150,000 reads and 50,000 writes per second

• Unbalanced utilization

  Some clusters were highly loaded and others were barely used, causing unbalanced, inefficient utilization and difficulties in scaling out

• Bloated, siloed footprint

  200 servers and multiple clusters of nodes per studio made the footprint difficult to manage and operate

• Poor maintainability

  Disk failure was rampant and the malfunctions forced Playtika to replace their disk every 6-12 months

Resilient performance through massive growth from 6M to 34M active users

Playtika’s solution with Aerospike has allowed the IT group to offer a shared service private cloud that combines all the source data in one unified platform. Aerospike enabled Playtika to scale the business efficiently, affordably, and reliably through data storage expansion that helped it grow its customer base from over six million daily online players in more than 190 countries to over 35 million users.

• Build, maintain, and grow Playtika’s private cloud

  Ability to build, maintain, and grow Playtika’s private cloud with 34M active users and 9TB processed every day

• 24/7 real time operations

  Provide 100% uptime with including resilience, disaster recovery procedures, and infrastructure

• Compliance with governance and regulations

  Able to meet requirements to maintain security and keep personal information safe, worldwide

• Growth in 13 countries

  Supporting the business as it scales to 10 different technical platforms and sites in 13 different countries

A unified platform with reduced footprint, higher throughput, and more data

With Aerospike, Playtika has been able to grow and scale to meet the needs of its growing business. Aerospike’s focus on Playtika’s success, close involvement in architectural decisions, attention to business problems, and availability as a partner led to Playtika’s successful design and implementation of the solution. Their diverse portfolio of games is now synchronized across platforms and devices; all their teams can access data from a single unified platform via their private cloud.

• 300% performance boost

  200,000 reads and writes per second now 600,000

• 6x reduction in server footprint

  From 200 servers to 30 Aerospike servers

• Up to 50% fewer nodes per cluster

  5-6 nodes per cluster dropped to 3-5 nodes per cluster

• 250% data growth

  Each studio increased from 2TB of unique data to 5 TB, with 4B unique objects

• $4.2M projected savings

  Over 3 years in total cost of ownership (TCO)