David LoweSr. Technical Director

Electronic Arts

Free games• 100+ board, casino, puzzle, word, arcade games• Community – avatars, chat, challenges• Prizes, tokens – rewarding performance &

participation

Subscription service• 40+ exclusive games• Enhanced community – badges, profiles• Microtransactions (gems) – premium items, badge

albums• $5.99/month or $39.99/year

Distributed games service• Online and mobile• Facebook• iPhone• Yahoo! Games

Traditional Centralized ITSingle shared project queueLarge overhead for small projectsCostly & inflexible

Monolithic Deployments – don’t miss the bus!

Hotly contested shared integration environments

For us, the decision to leverage the cloud was easyBut how?

No silver bullet

Identify & separate services

Over time we plan to migrate more and more services to the cloud

SimpleDB

SQSRDSEBS

Core Services

S3

Oracle RAC

Other EA Services

REST / jSON / HTTPsAWS Based

EA Hosted

Problem: QA needs to regularly update to test the latest build – how do we automate this step?

Typical answer: let’s write an installer!• Better than nothing, but…• Kitchen sink scripting• Ownership avoidance• Solution is unique to QA or dev environments, not

production

We can do better

Source Control

(P4)Automated Builds

(Maven & Hudson)

Maven Repository

(Nexus)

Debian RepositoryJetty

JDK

• Everything deployed is contained in an OS package

• A package contains version info and all dependencies (internal or external)

Ubuntu EC2 node%apt-get pogoweb_v123

AWS Based

EA Hosted

RightScale has terrific monitoring capabilities.You can easily extend these capabilities yourself

Web Application JMX

IntegrationScript collectd RightScale

Example Performance Metric

We use syslog-ng, Hive, & Hadoop to crunch logs and summarize data into SimpleDB - Extensive performance & internal error reportingBusiness insights via scheduled Microstrategy/Hive jobs

Amazon’s MapReduce makes this easy

Web Node1

Web Node2

Web Node3

…Syslog Node S3

Transform jobs

Other EA data

• Deployments are faster and require no downtime

• Integration environments are inexpensive• Consistent build & deploy pipeline• Rollback is easy• Adding capacity is easy• Team is more empowered and enjoys additional

ownershipExciting transition for software developersContinually raising software abstractions higher and higherIt really works