25. Illuvium’s Serverless Architecture Will Be “Best-Of-Breed,” Says Lead Server Engineer John Avery

Illuvium’s unique design gives us the opportunity to utilise a wholly serverless architecture. This offers universal benefits for the DAO — and “universal benefits” are what a DAO is all about. Those benefits include: seamless and infinite scaling, considerable security advantages, and significantly reduced operational costs. Illuvium is a showcase to the gaming industry of what is possible as a pioneering serverless AAA title on the Ethereum blockchain.

John Avery, Lead Server Engineer at Illuvium, has a background in designing and building backends for large financial institutions. That work always has a need to integrate and interact with a large number of legacy systems, which means that design sacrifices need to be made. At Illuvium, John has the very rare opportunity to build in a truly green field where he can leverage the latest and best cloud technology.

“I was the first technical resource brought into the project and built the first prototypes of Illuvium using the Unity game engine,” John explains regarding his recruitment and first actions in his role. “Although I still maintain a technical director role overseeing the game client, I’m now focusing mostly on ensuring our backend is fast, secure, and cost effective.”

In the case of “infinite scaling,” all the players of Illuvium won’t be divided into regional zones and limited to only playing with other players on their server because the serverless model brings everyone into the same world. It also means that at launch there’s no chance that the game will lack enough servers to support the number of players. The serverless model leverages the resources of cloud giants, like AWS and Google, to provide effectively infinite scale.

John says “When we talk about scale, what we are really talking about is how many players we can support. In a typical server model you might have constraints on the number of players that a single server can support, and supporting more players means adding more servers.”

From a scale perspective, this architecture means we can support tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of players, without making changes to our code.

“Serverless computing is about leveraging cloud services in such a way that our operational unit is a single function rather than more traditional, and much larger, units — namely, servers,” John explains. “We don’t deploy servers. We don’t manage hardware. Instead, we directly manage the individual pieces of logic that make up our game world.”

‘Logic’ in this context means the code that defines how the game works. When Ramphyre launches into the air and rains down a fiery hellstorm on his enemies, that’s a piece of logic. The logic controls when the ultimate ability is triggered, which enemies it hits, and how much damage it does.

How does “serverless” actually allow developers to build, and run, applications of all sizes, without being required to manage servers for them? Because the servers involved (and yes, there are of course servers involved) are the responsibility of the cloud service provider, as opposed to, in this case, Illuvium ourselves. Providers handle all the routine server maintenance, infrastructural scaling, security patching, capacity management, monitoring, and logging — and so on.

“In a serverless model, as the name suggests, we don’t build servers,” John reiterates. “The cloud provider, in our case Amazon Web Services (AWS), handles all of the underlying infrastructure allowing us to focus on building the logic of our game.”

Conveniently for our developers, this means they get to focus solely on what they love: creating apps. Developers package their code in containers that are deployed on-demand. When some kind of event triggers the code, the provider allocates resources for that code, and when the code finishes executing, no more resources are tapped. Functions only launch as needed. Otherwise, the functions are idle.

When a serverless function isn’t executing, it costs nothing to sit idle. Meanwhile, serverless frees the developers from tedious daily server provisioning and scaling labor. This one-two punch significantly mitigates the typically exorbitant costs of running on one’s own servers.

It is the nature of the auto-battler feature of Illuvium, particularly its unique deterministic game design, that makes leveraging this cutting-edge technology the best development model, period. “Typically action games involve a lot of ‘chatter’ between the server and the players,” John says. “The server has to constantly sync the locations, attributes and actions of a number of interacting players. Such a model is not suited to a serverless architecture.”

But auto-battlers operate quite differently. Although the action can be fast and furious, the player interactions are strategic and tactical decisions made at a much slower pace. “As Aaron and I discussed how the game would work,” John says, “the ability to operate it using a serverless model became apparent pretty quickly.”

Once the option for serverless was on the table, the decision for us to proceed with it was made pretty quickly. Although a serverless model can entail more upfront effort, the TCO of the system would be reduced, and just as importantly the cost scales predictably. ”Being able to reliably predict our costs, regardless of how large the game becomes, ensures we can build a game that satisfies both our players and our investors. Because we are decentralized, our players are our investors.”

The serverless model is quite popular for web applications, but hasn’t yet permeated deeply into gaming. There are some big players like Supercell who make use of AWS cloud services and serverless frameworks for their mobile games, but Illuvium is one of the first action oriented games for PC which makes use of this technology.

As a server engineer, John is most excited that Illuvium gives the opportunity to design and build a leading system in this class of games, “What Illuvium gives is an opportunity to design and build a best-of-breed system, to get everything right from the start, this is an opportunity anyone in the field would relish.”

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