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.
About the company
Playtika
Challenge
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.
Main problems:
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
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 day24/7 real time operations
Provide 100% uptime with including resilience, disaster recovery procedures, and infrastructureCompliance with governance and regulations
Able to meet requirements to maintain security and keep personal information safe, worldwideGrowth in 13 countries
Supporting the business as it scales to 10 different technical platforms and sites in 13 different countriesResults
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.
Key results:
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)
Testimonials
Having the best technology in the world and having the best team in the world is not enough. You really need to connect between them. You need to know how to use the technology. The path that we took with Aerospike and our [Aerospike] technical account manager is a game changer in this kind of project.
Ella Vidra, VP IT Ops and Engineering, Playtika
Aerospike has done the unthinkable: they cut our server footprint by a factor of six while boosting our performance 300%. The resulting total cost of ownership is saving us over a million dollars a year.
Guy Almog, Head of IT Engineering, Playtika
The simplicity of the IT operations that Aerospike affords my team frees them up for higher-value, future-looking initiatives. There are no late-night operational issues. It just works.
Guy Almog, Head of IT Engineering, Playtika
