GDC Festival of Gaming is part of the Informa Festivals 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.

March 9-13, 2026
Moscone CenterSan Francisco, CA

Agenda

Leveling Up with Google Cloud: PlayStation’s Global Migration to Spanner (Presented by Google Cloud)

Sailesh Krishnamurthy  (VP, Engineering, Google Cloud)
Shalin Shekhar  (Senior Principal Data Architect, Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Edward Chu  (Principal Software Engineer, Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Location: Room 2020, West Hall
Date: Monday, March 9
Time: 3:40 pm - 4:40 pm
Pass Type: Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Game & Production Technology
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: Video
Google Cloud

At the heart of the PlayStation™ ecosystem, a mission-critical service is responsible for a single, vital function: confirming every player's access to their games and digital content. For a platform with over 350 million user accounts, this entitlement system must be flawless, instant, and always available. As PlayStation's user base and content library grew, the decade-old legacy data architecture was pushed to its breaking point. Faced with spiraling costs and performance bottlenecks that directly impacted their most loyal players, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) needed more than just a new database—they needed a new paradigm. This is the story of how SIE migrated its planet-scale entitlement system to Google Cloud Spanner, a database uniquely designed for this class of problem, achieving a 10x reduction in storage and a 50% drop in costs, all with zero downtime.

Takeaway

The audience learns that "planet-scale" legacy systems can be modernized without service interruption. By migrating to Google Cloud Spanner, SIE achieved a 10x storage reduction and 50% cost savings, proving that global consistency and massive efficiency are possible through a cloud paradigm.

Intended Audience

The intended audience includes CTOs, cloud architects, and engineering leaders managing global-scale legacy systems. The takeaway is that migrating mission-critical data to Google Cloud Spanner eliminates performance bottlenecks and spiraling costs, delivering a 10x storage reduction and 50% savings with zero downtime.