QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Jesper Richter-Reichhelm, Head of Engineering at Wooga

Jesper Richter-Reichhelm

Biography: Jesper Richter-Reichhelm

Jesper is working as Head of Engineering at Wooga where he is responsible for the development of backends, i.e. game servers for their social games. Currently Wooga has 35 million monthly users making it the world's 3rd biggest developer of social games at Facebook. His passions are: Playing and working on games, developing highly scalable software that's used by millions, and speaking about both at conferences. Currently he is building a new game server using both of Erlang OTP and Ruby to bring real time user interaction to the domain of social gaming.

Presentation: Games for the Masses - How DevOps affects architecture design

Track: Architecture Evolution and Improvement / Time: Wednesday 11:50 - 12:50 / Location: Mountbatten Room

Building a backend for a successful social game is always challenging: It needs to service over 1 million users per day that generate 10.000 http requests per second or more whereas the vast majority of those requests are changing persistent state. Using a conventional technology stack that leads to over 50,000 database writes per second. Throughout the last two years half a dozen teams at Wooga have set out to build a backends for social games, each trying to improve on previous solutions. Each team was able to leverage experiences made by other teams but was free to choose their own technology stack and hosting environment. They also operated the game themselves in a DevOps way. This talk will trace back that evolution of backends: Starting out with a simple LAMP stack, first replacing PHP by Ruby, then replacing relational by NoSQL databases and ending up in maintaining stateful application servers utilizing Erlang OTP - and more. We will discuss limitations and problems we faced in live operation and show how later teams improved on the overall design