Gardner: Clearly one of the  requirements  in game development is the need to   ramp up a lot of servers to do the builds, but then they sit there essentially unproductive    between the builds. How did you flatten that out or manage the    requirements around the workload support?

Hart: Typically,  in the early stages of   development, there is a fair amount of testing  going on, and it tends   to be quite small -- the number of staff  involved in it and the number   of build iterations.

Going on,  when the game reaches to the end of its   product life-cycle, we’re  talking multiple game iterations a day and  the  game size has gotten  very large at that point. The number of people   involved in the testing  to meet the deadlines and get the game shipped   on date is into the  hundreds and hundreds of staff.

Gardner: How has virtualization and moving your workloads into different locations evolved over the years?

Hart: We work on the idea of having a central platform for a lot of these    systems. Using virtualization to do that allowed us to scale off at    certain times. Historically, we always had an on-premise VMware platform to do this. Very recently, we’ve been looking at ways to use that resource within a cloud to cut down from some of Capex loading but also remain a little bit more agile with some of the larger titles, especially online games that are coming around.

Gardner: We’re all very familiar with the amazing video games that are being  created nowadays. And SEGA of course is particularly well-known for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise going back a number of years. What are some of the other critical requirements that   you have from a systems architecture perspective when developing these games?

Hart: We have a lot of development studios across the world. We're working on  multiple projects.   We need to ensure that we supply them with a  highly scalable and   reliable solution in order to test, develop, and  produce the game and   the code in time. ... We’re probably   looking at  thousands of individual developers across the world.

... The  first part was dealing with the end of the   process, and that was the  testing and the game release process. Now,   we’re going to be working  back from that. The next big area that we’re   actively involved in is  getting our developers to develop online games   within the hybrid  environment.

So they’re designing the game and   the game’s  back-end servers to be optimal within the VMware  environment.  And  then, also pushing from staging to live is a very  simple process  using  the Cloud Connector.

We're restructuring and   redesigning the  IT systems within SEGA to be more of a development   operations team to  provide a service to the developers and to the   company.

Gardner: How did you start approaching that from your  IT  environment, to build the right infrastructure?

Targeting testing

Hart: One of the first areas we targeted very early on was the last process    in those steps, the testing, arguably one of the most time-consuming    processes within the development cycle.    It happens pretty much all the way through as well to ensure that the    game itself behaves as it should, it’s tested, and the customer gets   the  end-user experience they require.

The biggest technical  goal   that we had for this is being able to move large amounts of data,    un-compiled code, from different testing offices around the world to  the   staff. Historically we had some major issues in securely moving  that   data around, and this is what we started looking into cloud  solutions   for this.

For very, very large game builds, and we're talking game builds above 10 gigabytes,  it ended up being couriered within the country and then overnight file  transfer outside of the country. So, very old school methods.

We    needed both to secure that up to make sure we understood where the   game  builds were, and also to understand exactly which version each of   the  testing offices was using. So it’s gaining control, but also   providing  more security.

Gardner: So we’re seeing a lot more of the role-play games (RPG) types of games, games themselves in the cloud. That must influence   what  you're doing in terms of thinking about your future direction.

Hart: Absolutely. We’ve been looking at things like the hybrid cloud model with VMware as a development platform for our developers. That's really what  we're   working on now. We've got a number of games in the pipeline that  have   been developed on the hybrid cloud platform. It gives the  developers a   platform that is exactly the same and mirrored to what it  would   eventually be in the online space through ISPs like Colt, which should be hosting the virtual cloud platform.

Gaining cost benefits

And one of the benefits we're seeing in the VMware offering is that regardless of what data center in the world is the standard platform, it also allows us to leverage    multiple ISPs, and hopefully gain some cost benefits from that.

Very   early on we were in discussions with Colt and also VMware to understand   what technology stack they were bringing into the cloud. We started   doing a proof of concept with VMware and a professional services company, and together we were    able to come over a proof of concept to distribute our game testing    code, which previously was a very old-school distribution system. So    anything better would improve the process.

There wasn't too much    risk to the company. So we saw the opportunity to have a hybrid cloud    set up to allow us to have an internal cloud system to distribute the    codes to the majority of UK game testers and to leverage high  bandwidth   between all of our sites.

For the game testing studios around Europe and the world, we could use a hosted version of the same service which was up on the Colt Virtual Cloud Director (VCD) platform to supply this to trusted testing studios.

Gardner: When you approach this hybrid cloud model, what about managing that?   What  about having a view into what’s going on so that you know what   aspects  of the activity and requirements are being met and where?

Hart: The virtual cloud environment of vCloud Director has a web portal that allows you to manage a lot of this configuration in a central way. We’re also using VMware Cloud Connector,    which is a product that allows you to move the apps between different    cloud data centers. And doing this allows us to manage it at one    location and simply clone the same system to another cloud data center.

In    that regard, the configuration very much was in a single place for us    in the way that we designed the proof of concept. It actually helped    things, and the previous process wasn’t ideal anyway. So it was a    dramatic improvement.

One of the immediate benefits was  around the design process. It's very   obvious that we were tightening  up security within our build delivery  to  the testing studios. Nothing  was with a courier on a bike anymore,  but  within a secured transaction  between the two offices.

Risk greatly reduced

Also    from a security perspective, we understood exactly what game assets   and  builds were in each location. So it really helped the product    development teams to understand what was where and who was using what,    and so from a risk point of view it’s greatly reduced.

In terms of stats and the amount of data throughput, it’s pretty large, and we’ve been moving terabytes pretty much weekly nowadays. Now we’re going completely live with the distribution network.

So    it’s been a massive success. All of the UK testing studios are using    the build delivery system day to day, and for the European ones we’ve    got about half the testing studios on board that build delivery system    now, and it’s transparent to them.

VMware was very  good at allowing us to understand  the technology and  that's one of the  benefits of working with a  professional services  reseller. In terms  of gotchas,  there weren't too  many. There were a lot  of good surprises that came  up and allowed us  to open the door to a lot  of other VMware  technologies.

Now, we're also looking at alternating a lot of processes within vCenter Orchestrator and other VMware products. They really gave us a good stepping stone into the VMware catalogue, rather than just vSphere, which we were using previously. That was very handy for us.

Gardner: I’d like to just pause here for a second. Your use of vSphere 4.1  must have been an important   stepping stone to be able to have the  dynamic ability to ramp up and   down your environments, your support  infrastructure, but also skills.

Hart: Absolutely. We already have a fair footprint in Amazon Web Services (AWS),    and it was a massive skill jump that we needed to train members of  the   staff in order to use that environment. With the VMware  environment,  as  you said, we already have a large amount of skill set  using vSphere.  We  have a large team that supports our corporate  infrastructure and  we've  actually got VMware in our co-located public  environment as well.  So it  was very, very assuring that the skills  were immediately  transferable.

Gardner: Now that you've done this, any words   of wisdom, 20/20 hindsight, that  you might share with others who are   considering moving more  aggressively into private cloud, hybrid cloud,   and ultimately perhaps  the full PaaS value?

Hart: Just get some hands-on experience and play with the cloud stack from  VMware. It’s inexpensive to have a go and just get to know the  technology stack.

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