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Servo: Increasing the Scalability of Modifiable Virtual Environments Using Serverless Computing
Vrije Univ Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands..
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, TCS.
Vrije Univ Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands..
Vrije Univ Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands..
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2023 (English)In: 2023 IEEE 43RD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEMS, ICDCS, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2023, p. 829-840Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Online games with modifiable virtual environments (MVEs) have become highly popular over the past decade. Among them, Minecraft-supporting hundreds of millions of users-is the best-selling game of all time, and is increasingly offered as a service. Although Minecraft is architected as a distributed system, in production it achieves this scale by partitioning small groups of players over isolated game instances. From the approaches that can help other kinds of virtual worlds scale, none is designed to scale MVEs, which pose a unique challenge-a mix between the count and complexity of active in-game constructs, player-created in-game programs, and strict quality of service. Serverless computing emerged recently and focuses, among others, on service scalability. Thus, addressing this challenge, in this work we explore using serverless computing to improve MVE scalability. To this end, we design, prototype, and evaluate experimentally Servo, a serverless backend architecture for MVEs. We implement Servo as a prototype and evaluate it using real-world experiments on two commercial serverless platforms, of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Results offer strong support that our serverless MVE can significantly increase the number of supported players per instance without performance degradation, in our key experiment by 40 to 140 players per instance, which is a significant improvement over state-of-the-art commercial and open-source alternatives. We release Servo as open-source, on Github: https://github.com/atlarge-research/opencraft.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2023. p. 829-840
Series
IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ISSN 1063-6927
Keywords [en]
MVE, serverless, scalability, virtual environments, online games, backend, design, experimentation
National Category
Software Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-339331DOI: 10.1109/ICDCS57875.2023.00075ISI: 001081242600073Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85175065393OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-339331DiVA, id: diva2:1811037
Conference
43rd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), JUL 18-21, 2023, Hong Kong, HONG KONG
Note

ISBN 979-8-3503-3986-4

QC 20231110

Available from: 2023-11-10 Created: 2023-11-10 Last updated: 2023-11-14Bibliographically approved

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Ron Arteaga, Javier

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