Download PDF
Sleepy Giant Success Story
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Sleepy Giant, an independent online game company, was in need of a public cloud solution that could provide flexibility in scaling infrastructure up or down at a moment's notice. The gaming industry is characterized by unpredictable usage spikes due to organic, viral uptake and paid promotions. When these spikes occur, it is crucial that infrastructure be quickly scaled up. If increased usage is not met with adequate infrastructure, then players suffer from decreased response times, the game experience deteriorates and opportunities are missed. Sleepy Giant also required a support team with broad knowledge and competence to help build the right infrastructure for its partners. They were seeking a team that could provide customized solutions and recommend proven options to meet the continuously expanding needs of its diverse projects. Lastly, Sleepy Giant wanted to reduce infrastructure costs while continuing to deliver improvements in performance to customers. This meant considerations of alternatives to ownership and management of physical hardware.
About The Customer
Sleepy Giant is an independent online game company based in Newport Beach, California. The company works with top developers and publishers in the game industry, providing the tools and expertise to design, launch, operate, and expand game user bases. As the leading market partner in delivering games-as-a-service, Sleepy Giant is responsible for ensuring high-quality experiences for gamers. The company operates on a large scale, with 126 4-GB Joyent servers, Riverbed Stingray load balancers, Apache Web servers, and Percona MySQL databases.
The Solution
Sleepy Giant chose to deploy on the Joyent Cloud because of Joyent's unique, purpose-built infrastructure and knowledgeable support team. The Joyent Cloud enabled Sleepy Giant to use resources efficiently for both its small and large partners. Joyent's SmartOS technology provided Sleepy Giant with a way to bootstrap new games and then quickly scale up for launches. Additionally, Joyent’s dynamic scaling capacity eliminated the need for virtual servers in response to usage spikes. After starting with the deployment of a few servers, Sleepy Giant has grown its footprint to hundreds of Joyent web application servers, Riverbed Stingray load balancers, and Percona MySQL appliances for optimized, high-performance MySQL data stores. Sleepy Giant is able to take advantage of customizing the Joyent Cloud on the fly by adding or removing virtual CPUs, disk space, and RAM as needed. Sleepy Giant continually benefits from Joyent's up-to-date knowledge and involvement in cutting-edge technology. Joyent continually introduces new and improved ways of solving problems, whether the solution is one of its own offerings or one from a third-party vendor that compliments Joyent's offerings.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Factor-y S.r.l. – Establishes a cost-effective, security-rich development environment with SoftLayer technology
Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.
Case Study
Darwin Ecosystem: Accelerating discovery and insight through cutting-edge big data and cognitive technologies
Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.
Case Study
Zend accelerates, simplifies PHP development
Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.
Case Study
Delivering modern data protection with cloud scale backup from Cobalt Iron and IBM
Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.
Case Study
Achieving near limitless scalability and flexibility with data in the cloud
Web-based publishing platform SpaceCraft found that as its client base grew, it was spending an increasing amount of time managing its databases, distracting its focus from product innovation. As its user base rapidly expanded, data volumes at SpaceCraft began to rise dramatically. Along with their main focus on maintaining and further developing a great platform for web publishing, the SpaceCraft team had the added pressure of managing the increasing quantities of data while ensuring ongoing high performance for clients.
Case Study
nViso SA – Delivers emotion recognition solutions worldwide with a scalable SoftLayer hosting solution
nViso SA, a company that provides emotion recognition solutions, was in need of a high-performance cloud hosting infrastructure. The company wanted to extend its services to a global customer base. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle the demands of their growing customer base and the need for high performance and reliability.
