Since the launch of the first Atari game Pong in 1972, video game industry has experienced tremendous transformation. Today, the cloud is the origin of a new revolution in the virtual battlefield. Millions of players around the world is playing games via cloud in real time on a multitude of devices. Due to the nature of gaming, audiences need high uptime combined with sustained low latency, IBM and Softlayer have positioned themselves to give gaming developers a cloud-infrastructure tool to do exactly that.

IBM has taken a keen interest on cloud gaming industry. After the acquisition of cloud server company SoftLayer that serves more than 25,000 customers, IBM states that the number of active players that use the IBM SoftLayer cloud since 2012 has grown to 130 million people.

Last month, KUULUU and Multiplay were the two gaming companies to move to the IBM SoftLayer cloud platform. And Japan-based managed hosting service provider for mobile and smartphone application developers, DATAHOTEL, is the latest entrant to move to IBM SoftLayer’s cloud platform for its flagship service, “DATAHOTEL for App”, which many mobile game developers use to host their applications.

DATAHOTEL for App is the DATAHOTEL’s flagship service, which manages the IT infrastructure for gaming and smartphone application developers. The managed hosting services are provided to business owners who are developing the gaming apps in Japan. And as such DATAHOTEL has obtained a high reputation abroad in response to the demand for service deployment and operation.

“Our customers are not purely game and content companies, but [rather], they come from a range of industries. In order to better assist them, whether it be regarding for global expansion or disaster recovery, we were looking for the best possible cloud service,” said Kensaku Shimada, CEO, DATAHOTEL Co. Ltd.

The DevOpsAngle: Developers gaming with their heads in the cloud

At the nuts-and-bolts layer, IBM Softlayer provides an Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer to the online gaming industry but the takeaway for developers is much more powerful. To understand this impact, SiliconAngle contacted Marc Jones, vice president of product innovation, IBM SoftLayer, to talk about where developers fit in.

Jones speaks highly of Softlayer saying, “It is the premier provider offering choice to customers, particularly the gaming industry are looking for choice in how they design, implement, and deploy infrastructure to meet their needs.”

To explain this, Jones describes how Softlayer approaches customers as providing “choice” and to this the cloud-outfit delivers a hybrid bare metal server and cloud provisioned infrastructure.

A “bare metal server,” or the new definition for a dedicated server meaning that you don’t share it with anyone, provides single-tenant compute with just a single OS on it managed by the provider as part of the public virtual cloud. This infrastructure is very strong for high-IO applications such as database (MongoDB, MySQL, etc.) to provide that sustained power and lowered latency that online action video games require to keep audience experience at optimum.

The hybrid part is the public virtual cloud, giving a use-case for rapid expansion, scale-up scale-down, and swift provisioning. This part is great for anything ancillary to the core gaming experience such as UI, in-game social, chat, and anything that can experience sudden spikes in application use but can survive a little lag. Some gaming developers might even use this virtual public cloud on top of bare metal servers to act as a sort of elastic buffer to help absorb traffic spikes on top of planned-for expectations.

Finally, because Softlayer has cloud data centers across the world (with 40 more planned in expansion) the company also has a private network connecting all the sites together. This means that customers can spin up their virtual public cloud in one datacenter and their bare metal servers in a different one–and because of the private network they’re able to talk to each other with high bandwidth. This means that developers can have bare metal servers set up in the US and virtual cloud compute in the UK and the two can exchange data over the private network without needing to use the public Internet—increasing security and lowering latency.

Since Softlayer provides a hybrid IaaS experience to developers, applications can be built more quickly to take advantage of sheer power and elasticity as needed. For DevOps teams this means an increased sense of stability along with the ability to elastically stretch compute when needed (or save on cost during lower traffic hours.)  For the global market, IBM Softlayer’s still-expanding network of datacenters will also give DevOps teams a huge breath of fresh air when it comes to being “closer” to audience members to lower that ever-feared latency.

IBM set to build global cloud infrastructure

One of the biggest challenges in gaming industry is network latency and this is where IBM SoftLayer provides a significant advantage. IBM ​​earlier announced that it will invest $1.2 billion in its global cloud infrastructure. The company is building fifteen new data centers and plans to increase the coverage of its network to 40 datacenters spread over five continents. This means IBM can offer the extremely high network performance which is required by the gaming companies.

Earlier this year, IBM announced that game development studio KUULUU and world’s largest online game servers provider Multiplay are using IBM SoftLayer’s cloud capabilities to power widely popular games such as Battlefield 4 and RECHARGE.

Cloud gaming is set to unleash a revolution in the gaming industry. In 2012, the online market of streamed and downloaded games was worth $38 billion. As per Gartner estimation, the figure would reach $111 billion by 2015. Developers can provide continuous access to their products, for any device whatsoever in the cloud. And because their users to stream games directly from the cloud instead of downloading them, there is more space available on the devices themselves.

With SoftLayer, IBM hopes to provide a first solution available on the market: the combined security features, security and reliability of cloud computing environments with particular characteristics and speed of economic public cloud environmental.

Contributing authors: Saroj Kar and Kyt Dotson