AWS Case-Study: MPL- A Fast-Growing Mobile Gaming Market
CASE STUDY: MPL(Mobile Premier League)
MPL Gaming Platform Goes from Zero to 40 Million Users on AWS
We come across the advertisements of MPL on Television daily. Where the client(users or players) claim to win Lakhs of rupees just by playing!! How can this be! How can anyone just earn lakhs & lakhs of rupees just by playing! Let’s Investigate!
As an assignment of ARTH-The school of technologies, we were asked to case study on any of the start-ups which got benefited from cloud computing services of AWS. And, I have chosen MPL.
Mobile Premier League (MPL)
MPL is an eSports platform for mobile gaming in India. The company offers more than 40 games, including fantasy sports such as cricket, that can be played for cash prizes. Launched in August 2018, the app now has more than 40 million subscribers, with 100 games played per second.
A Fast-Growing Mobile Gaming Market
With the proliferation of smartphones and affordable mobile data plans in India, mobile gaming is quickly becoming a common pastime. According to Kantar IMRB, India currently ranks fifth among the world’s top mobile gaming markets. Bangalore-based Mobile Premier League (MPL) is one of the biggest and fastest-growing players, offering more than 40 games via its eSports platform. All games, including fantasy sports or the country’s favorite, Rummy, can be played for cash prizes. The MPL mobile app launched in September 2018 and acquired 10 million users within three months, which met the company’s one-year subscriber goal.
Today, MPL has more than 40 million subscribers, making up 14 percent of the total mobile gaming market in India, according to the 2019 report “The Power of Mobile Gaming in India.”
“AWS has been by our side throughout our entire growth journey, from debugging to stabilizing and optimizing to now expanding our product.” — — -Mukta Aphale
Vice President, Reliability and Engineering, MPL
Dedicated Support
With such rapid growth, MPL has relied on support from AWS for debugging and periodic re-architecting to scale. “Nailing down the problem is often the toughest part of debugging, and AWS was always there to help us,” Aphale says. The startup recently subscribed to AWS Enterprise Support to prepare for the launch of a big campaign. Teams appreciate having an AWS technical account manager (TAM) and AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) as part of the support package, with focused planning and ready assistance leading up to and during the launch.
“Having a dedicated TAM and IEM has led to a more detailed review of our architecture and guidance on how to optimize both the user experience and operating costs,” Aphale says. Early on, AWS hosted an AWS Dev Day event, where MPL teams used Amazon Inspector to uncover potential security vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. These vulnerabilities have since been resolved, and MPL has implemented Amazon GuardDuty for ongoing security monitoring.
Performance at Scale
AWS solutions architects held several discussions with MPL and shared the benefits of containerization. Following that, MPL conducted its own evaluation and moved ahead with containerizing its microservices using Kubernetes. The aim of this is twofold: to stabilize application performance at scale and improve operational efficiency. Its engineers use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run the containers with high availability. “We appreciate being able to control our architecture and decide where and how to automate things. Amazon EKS is much more robust than open source Kubernetes,” Aphale explains.
Implementation of containers is just the first step in MPL’s cost optimization journey. During its first year of operations, the company was focused on scaling and right-sizing its architecture. Now, teams are working on optimizing infrastructure costs and looking to innovate further. Aphale says, “We’re pleasantly surprised with the proactive help from AWS to improve our architecture and save costs.”
Working with their assigned TAM on finding the right instance types for production versus non-production workloads has gone a long way toward reducing costs. In addition, MPL signed up for the AWS Enterprise Discount Program. Since beginning cost optimization exercises, MPL has cut infrastructure costs by 40 percent. “These savings have allowed us to scale our AWS infrastructure to roll out a lot more features and games, which creates a more interesting user experience with features such as audio chat,” Aphale says.
Keeping Customers Happy
A large portion of MPL’s new customer base comes from referrals, so the business focuses heavily on customer satisfaction. For instance, because sub-millisecond latency is critical in gaming to ensure players don’t experience a lag between moves, MPL has been able to maintain an API response time of 30 milliseconds or less since its launch.
In working with AWS to fine-tune its architecture, engineers have also improved the app’s service availability. “Our app uptime has increased significantly to 99.9 percent,” Aphale says. Due to MPL’s confidence in the underlying AWS architecture, the DevOps team is more geared up to take on new challenges. Taking advantage of managed services from AWS and increased automation allow the team to take on development tasks they find interesting and to learn about technology applications such as containers firsthand.
In its road to expansion, MPL launched its gaming platform in Indonesia in July 2019 and is awaiting the launch of AWS data centers in the country by 2022. Aphale concludes, “AWS has been by our side throughout our entire growth journey, from debugging to stabilizing and optimizing to now expanding our product.”
AWS Services Used:
1) Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multiregion, multimaster, durable database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications.
2) Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service. Customers such as Intel, Snap, Intuit, GoDaddy, and Autodesk trust EKS to run their most sensitive and mission critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability.
3) Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
4) AWS Enterprise Support
AWS Enterprise Support provides you with concierge-like service where the main focus is helping you achieve your outcomes and find success in the cloud.
Benefits of AWS
· Ensures API latency of 30 milliseconds or less
· Maintains application uptime of 99.9%
· Cuts infrastructure costs by 40%
· Provides automation to support growing its business without increasing resources
Not only, MPL, Companies of all sizes across all industries are transforming their businesses every day using AWS.
