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How Draw Something Grew to 50 Million Downloads in 50 Days

Frank WeigelVP, Products, Couchbase

@FrankWeigel

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Draw Something by OMGPOP

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Fastest Growing Mobile Game. Ever.

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Draw Something Viral Growth

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Draw Something by OMGPOPDaily Active Users (millions)

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Scaling Isn’t Easy. Ask Homer.

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The Simpson’s: Tapped OutDaily Active Users (millions)

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EA Launches The Simpsons Tapped Out

#2 Free app on iPad#3 Free app on iPhone

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In the Beginning…

Draw Something by OMGPOPDaily Active Users (millions)

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Launch Day:30,000 downloads

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Initial Scalable Architecture

Amazon S3

NGINX & Thin Ruby App Server

• Designed for scalability

• Smart client style mobile app

• Scalable app server tier

• Scalable KV storage as SaaS

– Amazon S3

HAProxy (Load balancer)

Mobile App Frontend

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Application Layer Struggles

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First week:Million downloads

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Scaling App Layer

Amazon S3

• App server congestion

• Scalability isn’t all you need

• Synchronicity & high throughput don’t mix

NGINX & Thin Ruby App Server

HAProxy (Load balancer)

NGINX & Goliath Ruby App Server

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Data Layer Struggles

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Weeks in:• 1.2 million downloads• 30 drawings/second

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NoSQL to the rescue.

• Couchbase Server NoSQLdatabase

• Easy on-line scalability

• Lazy migration for existing data

Couchbase Server

Amazon S3

HAProxy (Load balancer)

NGINX & Goliath Ruby App Server

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Scaling Out Under Load

REPLICA

ACTIVE

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READ/WRITE/UPDATE READ/WRITE/UPDATE

APP SERVER 1

COUCHBASE Client Library

CLUSTER MAP

COUCHBASE Client Library

CLUSTER MAP

APP SERVER 2

COUCHBASE SERVER CLUSTER

User Configured Replica Count = 1

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2M -> 4M Users in Two Days

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Weeks in:• Number 1 in AppStore• Millions of new players per day• 1,000 drawings/second

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Bigger is Still Better

• Linear Scalability! Oh no…

• Size matters

• SSD to fight fragmentation impact

Couchbase Server

HAProxy (Load balancer)

NGINX & Goliath Ruby App Server

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Nodes Fail, Game Must Go On

REPLICA

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APP SERVER 1

COUCHBASE Client Library

CLUSTER MAP

COUCHBASE Client Library

CLUSTER MAP

APP SERVER 2

User Configured Replica Count = 1

COUCHBASE SERVER CLUSTER

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Crazy Scale

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Weeks in:>2000 drawings/secondOver 1 Billion Drawings

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Whack-a-bottleneck

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Race to Keep Up

• Continue scaling all tiers

• Scale HAProxy tier

• Add DNS load balancing

• Don’t sleepNGINX & Goliath Ruby App Server

Couchbase Server

HAProxy

DNS Load Balancers

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50 Million Downloads in 50 Days

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• 50 million downloads• 3,000+ drawings/second• 2 billion drawings• 105,000 TPS• 3.3 TB data stored

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Scalability Takeaways

• You can tune, but you can’t retrofit

• Scaling needs to be easy and online

• Failure is a certainty

• Bigger is still better

• Sleep is overrated

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THANK YOU

LEARN MORE AT HTTP://WWW.COUCHBASE.COM

@FRANKWEIGEL