Game Developers Conference (GDC) is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Building, Scaling, and Maintaining 'Sea of Thieves' Live Services

Matt Cavanagh  (Lead of Live Services, Rare Ltd)

Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass - Get your pass now!

Track: Programming

Format: Lecture

Vault Recording: TBD

Audience Level: All

Dive into the complex Azure cloud infrastructure that powers Sea of Thieves, a AAA live service game with over 40 million players served by a web of microservices dealing with hundreds of billions of requests per month. In this session, we'll explore the architecture of a large-scale live service stack, focusing on resilient systems design and challenges we've faced along our journey. Learn about strategies we have for handling large releases and mitigating incidents, plus gain insights into our data management techniques, including aging out data to cheaper storage while maintaining player progress. Finally, discover our approach migrating large amounts of data in an environment that is almost-always online.

Takeaway

Attendees will gain practical insights into our approach to managing large-scale cloud infrastructure for live service games. They will learn about resilient system design, innovative scaling techniques, efficient data storage solutions, and handling live data migrations, all through the real-world case study of Sea of Thieves.

Intended Audience

Anyone interested in systems architecture. While it will touch on specific technologies (mostly the Microsoft tech stack), the content will largely be around broad, understandable problems.



Connecting the Global Game Development Community