Possibilities Offered by Google App Engine for Developing Distributed Applications Using Datastore

2019

Information

The advent of utility computing has revolutionized almost every sector of traditional software development. Especially commercial cloud computing services, pioneered by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have provided an unprecedented opportunity for the fast and sustainable development of complex distributed systems. Nevertheless, existing models and tools aim primarily for systems where resource usage—by humans and bots alike—is logically and physically quite disperse resulting in a low likelihood of conflicting resource access. However, a number of resource-intensive applications, such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and large-scale simulations introduce a requirement for a very large common state with many actors accessing it simultaneously and thus a high likelihood of conflicting resource access. This paper presents a systematic mapping study of the state-of-the-art in software technology aiming explicitly to support the development of MMOGs, a class of large-scale, resource-intensive software systems. By examining the main focus of a diverse set of related publications, we identify a list of criteria that are important for MMOG development. Then, we categorize the selected studies based on the inferred criteria in order to compare their approach, unveil the challenges faced in each of them and reveal research trends that might be present. Finally we attempt to identify research directions which appear promising for enabling the use of standardized technology for this class of systems.

Section: Public/commodity Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Public/commodity Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A Systematic Mapping Study of MMOG Backend Architectures

2019

Information

“…One of the probable causes for this shift might be the inherent elasticity of these higher layers. Even though there have been several resources citing the use of higher layers such as Platform-as-a-Service and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) for MMOG backends [13,14], the hosting and development approaches used are not standardized in any way. Consequently, there has been very limited effort to develop and evaluate models and methods to facilitate the development of this type of software on such infrastructure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Athlos: A Framework for Developing Scalable MMOG Backends on Commodity Clouds

2022

Software

The development of resource-intensive, distributed, real-time applications like Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) backends entails a variety of challenges, some of which have been extensively studied. Despite some advancements, the development and deployment of MMOG backends on commodity clouds and high-level computing layers continues to face several obstacles, including a non-standardized development methodology, lack of provisions for scalability, and the need for abstractions and tools to support the development process. In this paper, we describe a set of models, methods, and tools for developing scalable MMOG backends and hosting them on commodity cloud platforms. We present Athlos, a framework that allows game developers to leverage our methodology to rapidly prototype MMOG backends that can run on any type of cloud environment. We evaluate this framework by conducting simulations based on several case-study MMOGs to benchmark its performance and scalability, and compare the development effort needed, and quality of the code produced with other approaches. We find that MMOGs developed using this framework: (a) can support a very high number of simultaneous players under a given latency threshold, (b) elastically scale both in terms of runtime and state, and (c) significantly reduce the amount of effort required to develop them. Coupled with the advantages of high-level computing layers such as Platform, Backend, and Function-as-a-Service, we argue that our framework accelerates the development of high-performance, scalable MMOGs, that leverage the resources of commodity cloud platforms.

Multiplayer Game Backends: A Comparison of Commodity Cloud-Based Approaches

Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing

2020

The development of resource-intensive complex distributed systems such as the backend side of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) has shifted towards cloud-based approaches in recent years. Despite this shift, researchers and developers have mostly utilized proprietary clouds to provide services for such applications -thus leaving the area of commodity clouds largely unexplored. The use of proprietary clouds is almost always applied at the Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer, thereby enforcing restrictions on the development of MMOGs. In a previous work we focused on the characteristics of MMOGs, outlining certain factors that prohibit their deployment on commodity clouds. In this paper, we evaluate the suitability of common public cloud platforms in developing and deploying the backend side of MMOGs. In our approach, we implement a simple MMOG over three popular public cloud platforms. Then, we evaluate their performance by measuring the latency of the game over each platform as well as the maximum size of game worlds supported by each approach. Our measurements show that approaches based on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer perform better than those based on the Platform-as-a-Service layer -which was expected. However, our results indicate that MMOGs based on the Platform-as-a-Service layer can also perform relatively well and within the bounds of real-time latency. Coupled with accelerated development and lower maintenance costs, Platform-as-a-Service technology paves the way for further development of MMOG specific Backend-as-a-Service platforms.