Session: Pushing To The Edge: Unlocking Gameplay Potential With The Cloud - Jason Attwood.

Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] So up next, I would like to welcome Jason Atwood to the stage. Uh he's going to be talking about gaming with the with the clouds and the the unique opportunities there. So please welcome Jason. All right, let's get cracking. Um so yes, thanks everyone for coming. This is uh this is my talk on leveraging the cloud um in gaming applications. I think I think everyone can still hear me. Um, so yeah, we're going to get right into it. So, a little bit about me. Uh, my name is Jason. I'm a solutions engineer uh at Cloudflare in our gaming and eye gaming team. Um, that basically means

that I help uh our customers solve their technical problems uh with Cloudflare. Um, before Cloudflare, I actually used to work in the gaming industry um in esports. So, this pictures of a a soldout Wembley Arena uh for one of the events that I worked on. Um, and I actually worked in the the broadcast section. Um, specifically, it's probably a little bit small, but in the bottom right hand um, picture, all the game overlay stuff that was driven by the uh, the data uh, from the game. Um, that was all me. So, all the game integration stuff. So, that's a little bit about me. Um, a little bit about Cloudflare uh, and, uh, what Cloudflare actually is if, um, you're you're not familiar. Essentially, Cloudflare is a a cloud services um provider, but really underneath that um Cloudflare is a network, right? So, all of these dots on the map are all of our um data center locations. We call them POPs or points of presence. Um and there are 335 of them uh around the world uh across 125

or over 125 countries. Um and this number is always increasing. Um with that we haveund uh about 150 terabits per second of network capacity. Um and due to uh well it's also the most one of the most interconnected networks in the world. So we actually have three uh sorry 13,000 u networks that make up the internet that are directly connected uh with our network. And all of that combined means that we're essentially within um sorry if this microphone's being funny. um is that we're within about 50 milliseconds of 95% of the world's uh internet connected population. So um yeah, our services are are nice and quick. Um we've got quite a few customers in the in the gaming space. Um some of our biggest ones include CCP Games, who are the uh the creators of Eve Online, um and the EVE franchise of games. Um they've got about 300 uh 300,000 active players a month uh and they're based in in Iceland. Uh we also have Cybo, who

you might have heard of, who are the creators of Subway Surfer. Um they're they're bringing in many more players, 150 million active monthly users. Um they're based out of Copenhagen. And uh we also have Discord. I'm sure everyone knows Discord. Um they got 200 million active users. Um and they're based out of San Francisco or San Francisco. Um so the point of this slide is really just to iterate that we work with companies of all sizes um in the gaming industry based all around the world. Um so no matter where you are um we uh we can support you. So that's enough about cloud player. Um what I really want to talk about is games and specifically online games. Um so when we talk about online games we might be thinking of just traditional multiplayer games, right? So, you might be thinking of your Call of Duties or your Formula 1's or Valerant or anything that's just like traditionally multiplayer, but I kind of want to expand the scope um to include what I've deemed uh asynchronous multiplayer games. So, these are games

where you don't necessarily have to be um all the players don't have to be connected at the same time, right, uh to still play. So examples would be something like Clash of Clans where you're building your base and then um you know you can put the game down and someone else can go and interact with your base um you know and raid your base while you're not there. Um other examples would be turn-based games like Civilization or or like chess for example, right? Where you can make your turn, go away, someone else can make their turn, you can come back and still play the same game. Um or other examples would be like racing games with leaderboards or like ghost cars. Um where again you kind of set your time and then people can can still play. You're still playing the same game just not at the same time. Um an honorable mention goes to uh to Bullettorm. Has anyone played Bullet Stom or is aware of it? Give me a hands up. Anyone? Okay. No one. Okay. So Bullet Storm, the reason it's up there is this honorable mention for me. It's a it's a shooting game um but has this leaderboard system where you're competing for points um for

basically getting through the levels as quick as you can and creatively as you can. And the reason it's up there is cuz that's the only leaderboard based uh multiplayer that I've ever really gotten into. Um I had a little competition with my friends at school um who can get the best score on the on uh each level and it was great fun. So that's why uh it's an honorable shout out. It's a great game if if you've not played it. Okay, so we said we said kind of like the real-time multiplayer and the asynchronous multiplayer games, but I also want to broaden the scope even more um to include all types of online features, right? Because even for single player games, you're kind of hardressed to find a game that has absolutely no online component these days, right? Whether it's things as simple as achievements or cloud saves or user analytics and the telemetry you know analyzing player um you know habits and how they're interacting with your game to inform uh future game updates. Um everyone's favorite topic microtransactions um and and you know in-game shops and how you power those. I

mean, even in single players, uh, single player games, it's it's extremely common. Um, especially recently with like, um, the Oblivion remaster, you know, uh, you can go get your horse armor from the in-game shop. Um, another one which is another popular topic is is DRM. So, uh, digital rights management software u for how you basically for antipiriracy um, uses. Uh, also social metagame. So, uh I'm not sure if people are familiar, but um game called Hell Divers has this sort of um social meta game going on where it will look at uh the levels that the players are playing and sort of use that to dictate uh future game updates and almost like the the game narrative um and how the like the wider story of the game unfolds. Um and then this other feature that I'm kind of putting into player player clues. So, this is games um like Soulslike games where you can leave clues to interact with other players games. So, you're not in their game directly, but you might be leaving um clues or or signposts or or death

recaps, things like that. Um common in games like uh like the Souls Souls series and um uh Death Stranding games like that. So, when you think about all of those features um you know, whatever they are, it kind of all boils down into these three columns, right? First of which being data. You need some data to to store and to analyze and do stuff on. Then you have some custom logic to you know manipulate that data and and take um things out of it that you're trying to trying to achieve. Um and then an API to expose that data uh to link different systems and um you know actually leverage it. So with that in that in mind so we've got our three pillars of our application. We've also got to make some decisions about where we're going to deploy that app. Right? So you've kind of got two options. You can deploy it on premises or in the cloud, right? And there are some trade-offs as with everything in engineering and life. Um, if you're deploying on prem, you've got to buy the hardware, right? And you have to manage it yourself, which yes,

there there is overheads, but there are also benefits, right? There's relatively low ongoing costs. You don't you're not renting anything. You just have to pay for the power. Um, and you have full control and access to the server, right? Like it's your machine. You can do whatever you want to it. If you want to go plug a USB stick in it, go ahead. It's yours. It's literally a box uh in the cupboard. And then on the flip side of that, in the cloud, it's you're basically renting the hardware, right? Um so you don't have any initial outlay. You don't have to buy the hardware, but you do have to um keep up with a higher ongoing cost. Um but that means you're also only paying for the you that your usage rather than having this high power server with all this overhead um you know, extra power that you might not be using all the time. especially with game traffic, it can be quite spiky. So, there are going to be load times where your powerful server is kind of spinning its wheels and not really not really doing anything. Um, and also you have the benefit or the downside that you don't have to worry about the server. Um, you know, it means you can't go plug a USB stick into it. Um, but maybe

that's a that's a benefit as well because someone else is handling that for you. And realistically what it comes down to is you're probably going to go for a hybrid approach where some applications make sense to have on premises and some uh make sense to have in the cloud. Okay. So we've now decided whatever our decision was um we've got our application we know the three parts and we have um we've deployed it somewhere either on premises or in the cloud and now we should change our mindset a little bit into um how we're going to secure that um that application. So you might say oh we're going to put some authentication and some authorization on it. Um the difference being think of it like a like a bouncer outside of business. Um authentication is checking people are authentic and they are who they say they are. I.e. the person on the ID is the person you're talking to. Um and authorization is then is that person now we know who they are. Are they allowed to access what they're trying to access? So that's all well and good. We can you know make sure the right people are trying to interact with our um with our

application or our service. But those um those that dorman, right, if you like, those services that are those endpoints are still open to the internet, right? Anyone can attack them. And so just like um you know, if you had thousands of people come up to this one doorman who's trying to let people into your business, he's going to get pretty overwhelmed and that's going to slow the flow of people coming in, right? Um and it's the same in the in the technical world, right? So you have volutric attacks. Um so you might have heard the term DOS attacks, distributed denial of service attacks um which is basically flooding um a given service with lots of traffic uh and with the idea of taking it offline because it's so busy trying to um process all these malicious requests it can't uh service the the legit ones. Then some other attack vectors that you see are credential stuffing where an attacker will take um leaked credentials, so usernames and passwords from from known data breaches and just try and stuff them into a service right on the odd chance that someone's reused a password.

Um and they can gain access and take over the account. Um and then on that note as well, fishing, uh I'm sure everyone knows what fishing is and um all the emails that you get probably daily. Um, just wanted to highlight it here because it's still the number one attack vector um in the cyber security space. And of course, all of this stuff has uh has business implications, right? So, if your if your service gets attacked that's running your shop, for example, and that's your revenue source that goes offline, um that's bad news for the business, right? And also in gaming, if your service goes offline, players can't play, um you know, they're going to lose faith, probably move to a different game, maybe never come back. That's a lost player and a lost customer. Um this is my uh PSA slide. Um so if anyone who's not seen this website before, this is basically a site where you can check if your uh credentials if your username has been part of a known data breach. Um so you can put your email in and then it will come back with a list and tell you um if it if your user if your email address was found uh in a known breach and it will tell you

when it occurred, what the source was and what was what was leaked. It's um it's really good but also quite scary because um I for one my stuff has been leaked many times over and uh yeah the recommendation is to change your passwords and uh keep them unique. Okay so now we've kind of spoke about uh security now I want to pivot and talk about performance as well and so what are some ways that we can improve performance of our web applications? Um, so the first one being caching, which is basically if we have content that's common to a lot of people, rather than everyone going to the source and getting that information, we can put a caching layer in, right, and just serve that same content almost as an intermediary and uh push that out to everyone who's trying to see the same thing because it's the same for everyone. We can also look at optimizing the routting across the internet. So the internet's made out of lots of different networks and um traffic makes a lot of hops across the network and we can optimize that path, right? So um eliminate unnecessary hops or maybe

longer longer hops. Um and then you can also think about offloading application logic, right? You can scale your infrastructure so it's more powerful and can can process things quicker. Um or you can distribute it, right? And and move it across uh different servers um to optimize it that way. Cool. So now we get on to we've got all these problems. We got these security problems, these performance problems. So, how can Cloudflare help? So, just taking a little step back, I said that Cloudflare is a network. And what that really looks like in the in an application layout is um is this. So, Cloudflare sits in between your users and your um your infrastructure, right? Your origin um labeled in here. Um and it acts as a proxy, right? So, that means all the requests and all the traffic going through we see as an intermediary. And that lets us um do things like like caching, like doing that route optimization um and that security step as well, blocking any malicious traffic. Um again, these are our this is our network and these are all our locations. And what makes the Cloudflare network um

unique is that it's work that it's um structured on an any car system. I know the the slide might be a little bit small, but essentially the way it usually works is one machine somewhere in the world will have one IP address, right? and you make a request to that IP address um and it goes and if that IP address is in is in Turkey or in Brazil or in um in China that's where it goes. Cloudfare works a little bit differently in that all of our um all of our POPs in our network have the same IP address and depending on where you are and who you ask essentially where this IP is is um you'll get rooted somewhere else. Think of it as like asking someone where the nearest McDonald's is, right? They're not going to tell you where the one in Turkey is. they're going to tell you where the closest one is down the road. And the Cloudflare network works exactly the same. Um, which means that you get you get the quickest performance, right? Because your traffic isn't going to the other side of the world. It's coming back um from just down the road. Okay. And so we use this uh we use our network to run or to provide a whole

load of different services. So on the rightmost column we've got our application services which are really focused on what I covered earlier in terms of the the um performance and security optimizations. Uh we've got some networking stuff in the middle that I'm not going to cover. Um on the left we've got the uh our zerorust services which are really focused around um securing your infrastructure. So if you've got applications that you use uh internally um we've got a whole suite of products around securing those. Um, but the one I really want to dive into a bit more is this uh this bar underneath uh that says um Cloudflare Edge Developer Platform. And that's basically our offering um for building applications on the edge and on our network. So as I say it's the de developer platform and what it's really focused on is um our product called workers. Now workers is sort of our um our serverless function uh product. So think if you're familiar with AWS Lambda um it's similar to that in that you can write application code and it will run

in the cloud and it will also be deployed across our whole network. So it's not you make a request and it goes to the other side of the world again it will run local to where your user's making that request which makes it really speedy. Um I want to diving a little bit into the into the technical um can read through this slide but essentially the takeaway is for a lot of um cloud-based uh logic they use a container model where basically every process has a has an amount of overhead associated to it. So when a when a new process gets spun up there's you have to reapply all that overhead for each um each process. um workers looks works a little bit differently in that each process is still self-contained. So you can't you know they're not talking to one another but you only have that one set of overhead which means they fire up really quick um and can get right to doing the uh the work right away um and super speedy. Another unique aspect of workers is uh how we price it. So with a lot of

um cloud logic uh providers you get charged for the whole request duration, right? So you make a request to your your Cloudflare worker um and it maybe it goes and talks to a database or another function or a third party API whatever it may be um and you'll get charged for the whole time. Whereas with Cloudflare workers you only get charged for the the working time. So if you make a request to a third party API and you've got to wait say 200 milliseconds for that API to get back to you, you're not getting build on that time when the when the worker's just waiting. So similar to how um how I said Cloudflare works with um being a proxy and stand and sitting between your users and your um your web application. Uh it's similar to how workers works, right? So the events come in on the left side, hit the worker in the middle and then go and interact with another uh another web um uh application, right? It might be a database, might be a third party API. Um and also in the middle you can see that

workers are written in JavaScript. Um or you can al they workers also supports web assembly which means you can write in any language um that can compile down to web assembly. Um so what can you achieve with workers and what are the some what are some of the common use cases? Um here you can see a setup uh for doing like AB testing, right? So say you've got a new product that you want to incrementally um or incrementally roll out some uh some users to and get some testing to. Um you can do that, right? You have 90% uh of the traffic go to one version and 10% to another. Um but really you can build pretty much whatever you want with workers, right? Here are some common use cases, but say for a for a gaming use case, you could you could run the shop um from Cloudflare, right? you could you could serve different content to different users based on their location. Um or in the AB case, maybe you wanted to test different thumbnails for in-game items, something like that. Um really the world's your oyster and you can uh you know use it however you see fit. Uh

it really is a platform for you to deploy your your logic to. So that kind of covers off the the logic part and the API, right? The workers are exposed uh and you can make requests to them and uh develop your own logic. So, what about the data um column? So, we've got you covered there as well with a few different products depending on the shape of your data and uh and what uh form it takes. So, D1 is our um SQL database um if your data is well structured. Durable objects is sort of the stateful um brother to to workers. So, workers are stateless. you make a request to them, do some processing. But if you need some um if you need some longer lived lived state, maybe to um coordinate a a websockets um session or something like that, um you can use durable objects for that. Hyperdrive uh optimizes your database queries. So say you've already got a database, HyperDrive will um cache uh and speed up uh the existing requests.

Um KV is just key value store. It's just for saving configuration files, but it's it's super quick um and localized. Uh and then R2 is similar to S3 if you're familiar, but this is our just uh object storage. So, this is uh for files that you can store in the cloud. Um yeah, and you can put it all together uh to make a a full application, right? So you can use the application services at the front uh write your custom logic have the data hosted in um one of the storage solutions uh and then connect it to your analytics tools as well. So yeah it the uh the option is uh is pretty broad depending on how you want to how far you want to take it. And a bit of an announcement uh next month. So say you've got a application already um that uses containers and you don't want to port everything to uh to the cloud spec specifically. You can deploy your containers uh on Cloudflare network from next

month. Um maybe you're thinking about uh it sounds good but how big is it? We've currently got 300 uh 3 million uh developers including some of our biggest uh clients working on the on the developer platform. So, it's and it's well established. It's been going since 2019 and is always getting updated. So, that's really all I've got. Uh, I welcome you to sign up to a free account. Um, when it comes to the developer platform, you can pretty much do anything on the free plan. I think you get 100,000 requests a month or something. Um, so yeah, I uh invite you to sign up and see what you can build with Cloudflare. Uh so thank you very much and uh yeah if anything has piqu your interest uh we've got a booth just over there so come have a talk [Music] [Music]