[MUD-Dev2] Amazon (Not the Forest) run MMORPG

[Nicholas Koranda]

I have not been personally involved with the backend server side of a
massive online game but I understand the general concepts of how they
work.  One of the costs associated with running a server farm is the
inability to scale the cost of running the server farm with the scale of
the load.  For instance, if a game has 10,000 simultaneous users spread
out over 20 servers, the load is (if the players are equally spaced) 500
users per server.  Some server farms can scale what regions they cover
so that if groups of users merge into a smaller area, several servers
can be used to break up the load (i.e. a 1000 x 1000 "grid" could be
broken into two 500 x 1000 grids or some other way.)

Now the problem occurs when there are still 20 servers and only say
2,000 users or how about if there is a huge "flaming sword of sheeba"
contest and 25,000 users all log into to get a chance to win it.  Adding
more servers quickly can be a problem for two reasons:  1)  You would
have to have purchased them beforehand (inefficient and cost ineffective
since you dont always use them) or 2) you would have to get some more
when need arrises (at a cost of time and flexability (this is more of a
long term solution since you cant react to spikes in the load.)

So my thought is to use the Amazon.com S3 (Simple Storage Solution) and
ECC  (Elastic Compute Cloud) as the server base for a massive online
game.  The services allow you to only pay for what you use, including
server time.  For those that dont know, the ECC is a service that allows
you to "rent" an instance of a server on the Amazon ECC.  You basically
upload an image of what the hard drive would be on a server and it is
loaded each time you use it.  You pay $0.10 an hour for each instance of
the cloud.  You also pay $0.15/GB storage and $0.20/GB BW (That is what
the S3 service is.)

Anytime your userbase increases or decreases to a threshold, another
server instance would be fired up or shut down.  You could load up an
instance before hand as the load is increasing, or you could base it on
user login data from previous days/times.  The method you use to start
and stop instances is not important, it is the fact that with these
services you have a method to scale both updwards and downwards your
server farm with the server load, providing a very efficient and cost
effective way to handle the load of a MMORPG.

Any thoughts?