Keynote: How Ubisoft Orchestrates Global Multiplayer Games with Ago... J.F. Hubert & M. Mandel (ASL)

This talk features Mark Mandel, founder of Agones, who discusses the creation of a global multiplayer infrastructure using cloud native and open source technologies. He emphasizes the limitations of traditional tailored integrations for each cloud provider and introduces a model based on Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem. The speaker explains the significance of Agones, an open-source project that enables Kubernetes to effectively host and manage scalable game servers. He highlights its application in real-time multiplayer games, such as Rainbow Six Mobile, where the infrastructure adapts to player locations and peak demands, ensuring a stable global launch and rapid scaling. Mandel invites collaboration and contributions within the community to further develop this innovative gaming infrastructure.

Hi, my name is Jean-François software development director at Ubisoft. [laughter] 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 Rainbow

Six Mobile if you haven't already. Thank you. Thank you. >> [applause]