Building a high-performance platform on AWS to support real-time gaming services using Presto, Alluxio, and S3
December 13, 2020
By 
Serena (Teng) Wang

Electronic Arts (EA) is a leading company in the gaming industry, providing over a thousand games to serve billions of users worldwide. The EA Data & AI Department builds hundreds of platforms to manage petabytes of data generated by games and users every day. These platforms consist of a wide range of data analytics, from real-time data ingestion to ETL pipelines. Formatted data produced by our department is widely adopted by executives, producers, product managers, game engineers, and designers for marketing and monetization, game design, customer engagement, player retention, and end-user experience.

Near real-time information for EA’s online services is critical for making business decisions, such as campaigns and troubleshooting. These services include, but are not limited to, real-time data visualization, dashboarding, and conversational analytics. Highly time-sensitive applications such as BI software, dashboards and AI tools heavily rely on these services. To support these use cases, we studied an innovative platform with Presto as the computing engine and Alluxio as a data orchestration layer between Presto and S3 storage. We evaluated this platform with real industrial examples of data visualization, dashboarding, and a conversational chatbot. Our preliminary results show that Presto with Alluxio outperforms S3 significantly in all cases, with a 6x performance gain when handling a large number of small files.

Electronic Arts (EA) is a leading company in the gaming industry, providing over a thousand games to serve billions of users worldwide. The EA Data & AI Department builds hundreds of platforms to manage petabytes of data generated by games and users every day. These platforms consist of a wide range of data analytics, from real-time data ingestion to ETL pipelines. Formatted data produced by our department is widely adopted by executives, producers, product managers, game engineers, and designers for marketing and monetization, game design, customer engagement, player retention, and end-user experience.

Near real-time information for EA’s online services is critical for making business decisions, such as campaigns and troubleshooting. These services include, but are not limited to, real-time data visualization, dashboarding, and conversational analytics. Highly time-sensitive applications such as BI software, dashboards and AI tools heavily rely on these services. To support these use cases, we studied an innovative platform with Presto as the computing engine and Alluxio as a data orchestration layer between Presto and S3 storage. We evaluated this platform with real industrial examples of data visualization, dashboarding, and a conversational chatbot. Our preliminary results show that Presto with Alluxio outperforms S3 significantly in all cases, with a 6x performance gain when handling a large number of small files.

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