This blog post was co-authored by Patrick Mendenall, Principal Program Manager, Azure.
We are excited to join the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week to learn what’s new and share our work in Azure focused on enabling modern, global games via cloud and cloud-native technologies.
Cloud computing is increasingly important for today’s global gaming ecosystem, empowering developers of any size to reach gamers in any part of the world. Azure’s 54 datacenter regions, and its robust global network, provides globally available, high performance services, as well as a platform that is secure, reliable, and scalable to meet current and emerging infrastructure needs. For example, earlier this month we announced the availability of Azure South Africa regions. Azure services enable every phase of the game development lifecycle from designing, building, testing, publishing, monetizing, measurement, engagement, and growth, providing:
- Compute: Gaming services rely on a robust, reliable, and scalable compute platform. Azure customers can choose from a range of compute- and memory-optimized Linux and Windows VMs to run their workloads, services, and servers, including auto-scaling, microservices, and functions for modern, cloud-native games.
- Data: The cloud is changing the way applications are designed, including how data is processed and stored. Azure provides high availability, global data, and analytics solutions based on both relational databases as well as big data solutions.
- Networking: Azure operates one of the largest dedicated long-haul network infrastructures worldwide, with over 70,000 miles of fiber and sub-sea cable, and over 130+ edge sites. Azure offers customizable networking options to allow for fast, scalable, and secure network connectivity between customer premises and global Azure regions.
- Scalability: Azure offers nearly unlimited scalability. Given the cyclical usage patterns of many games, using Azure enables organizations to rapidly increase and/or decrease the number of cores needed, while only having to pay for the resources that are used.
- Security: Azure offers a wide array of security tools and capabilities, to enable customers to secure their platform, maintain privacy and controls, meet compliance requirements (including GDPR), and ensure transparency.
- Global presence: Azure has more regions globally than any other cloud provider, offering the scale needed to bring games and data closer to users around the world, preserving data residency, and providing comprehensive compliance and resiliency options for customers. Using Azure’s footprint, the cost, the time, and the complexity of operating a game at global scale can be reduced.
- Open: with Azure you can use the software you choose whether it be operating systems, engines, database solutions, or open source – run it on Azure.
We’re also excited to bring PlayFab into the Azure family. Together, Azure and PlayFab are a powerful combination for game developers. Azure brings reliability, global scale, and enterprise-level security, while PlayFab provides Game Stack with managed game services, real-time analytics, and comprehensive LiveOps capabilities.
We look forward to meeting many of you at GDC 2019 to learn about your ideas in gaming, discussing where cloud and cloud-native technologies can enable your vision, and sharing more details on Azure for gaming. Join us at the conference or contact our gaming industry team at azuregaming@microsoft.com.
Details on all of these are available via links below.
- Learn more about Microsoft Game Stack.
- Talks at GDC:
- Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 11:30 AM: Best Practices for Building Resilient, Scalable, Game Services in Microsoft Azure
- Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 12:45 PM: Save Time for Creativity: Unlocking the Potential for Your Game’s Data with Microsoft Azure
- Azure Gaming Reference Architectures: Landing Page
- GDC Booth demos for Azure:
- AI Training with Containers – Use Azure and Kubernetes to power Unity ML Agents
- Game Telemetry – Build better game balance and design
- Build NoSQL Data Platforms – Azure Cosmos DB: a globally distributed, massively scalable NoSQL database service
- Cross Realms with SQL – Build powerful databases with Azure SQL
