Keynote: How Ubisoft Orchestrates Global Multiplayer Games wit... Jean-François Hubert & Mark Mandel

In this talk, Mark Mandel, founder of Agones, discusses building a global multiplayer infrastructure utilizing cloud-native and open-source technologies. He emphasizes the challenges of creating tailored integrations for various cloud providers and introduces a shift in operational models defined by Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem. This approach allows for a build-once, deploy-everywhere strategy, facilitating the seamless management of game workloads across different environments. Mandel then highlights Agones, an open-source project that enhances Kubernetes for hosting and scaling game servers. He shares a use case with Rainbow Six Mobile, illustrating how Agones helps in dynamically managing global game server capacity and improving latency for real-time gameplay. The session concludes with a call for collaboration within the Agones community.

Hi, my name is Jean-François software software development director at Ubisoft. Hello everyone. My name is Mark Mandel. Uh today I'm not here representing Discord, but as founder of Agones. And today we'll show you how we've been building a truly global multiplayer infrastructure by leaning into cloud-native and open-source technologies. Building tailored integration for each cloud provider just isn't sustainable. The gap between providers keep growing, so the amount

of custom code required to keep up becomes a real drag on innovation. So, instead of chasing those differences, we flipped the model. We decided that our operational model will be defined by Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem. We can then adopt a build-once, deploy-everywhere mindset as a real strategy. We can take our workload and run them on any cloud provider or on prem with almost no friction. CNCF

projects can also evolve faster than any in-house solutions ever could, as we benefit from the improvements driven by thousands of contributors. So, instead of playing the catch-up game, we now stand on the shoulders of CNCF projects. This is what allows us to have the operational maturity we need to support worldwide massive multiplayer games. But, let's talk a little bit about authoritative multiplayer game server workloads, because those

are a little bit special. These power some of your favorite real-time multiplayer games, where all players connect to a single server. And that server is the authority over what is happening inside your game. What's fun about them though is they do this all in memory. So, if players are playing on the game server, you can't shut it down, because that's going to crash the game. Enter Agones.

The open-source project that teaches Kubernetes how to host, scale, and orchestrate game servers. And we're very excited to be a brand new sandbox project in the CNCF as of literally last week. Agones and communities really shine for us. For real-time gameplay, latency is key. So, deploying our game server worldwide, around the world, close to our players is a hard requirement. Agones allows us to easily place capacity

where players actually are. One of the best recent example of this is Rainbow Six Mobile. Since its launch last month, millions of game sessions have been served across multiple regions. This is important because different regions, different peaks, different availability conditions, and our infrastructure could adapt dynamically. We could route traffic, capacity, supporting workload to whatever cloud provider was best at any given moment. This architecture gave Rainbow Six

Mobile a stable global launch and the ability to scale fast when players wanted to play. And over the past 8 years, uh Agones has become a staple of the industry. Ubisoft, while delightful and thank you, isn't the only one running Agones. Here's just a smattering of folks who are also running Agones for their game server workloads, many of whom are contributors as well. So, if you want

to learn more about Agones, go to the links above or come say hi. We're always looking to build and develop more contributors. And if you want to learn more about Ubisoft latest game or if you want to be part of the great Ubisoft family, please visit us at ubi.com or just come talk to me directly. And do not forget to try and Rainbow Six Mobile if you

haven't already. Thank you. Thank you. >> [applause]