USE CASES
Astra DB for Gaming
Gaming encompasses a variety of player choices. Players can choose to play games on consoles or participate in online games, either through mobile, social, or cloud gaming platforms. Games can be single-player or multiplayer games with players joining from different regions and geographies. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) gaming platforms are also on the rise.
Players on these gaming platforms expect games to be available anytime and anywhere they are connected, giving them the ability to interact with other players live when they’re playing the game. Typical gaming services include player profile data, virtual products/goods catalogs, virtual currencies, player leaderboards, player communities, and messaging tools. To satisfy these requirements, gaming platforms rely on a data stack which is massively scalable, highly responsive, highly available across the globe, and flexible to accommodate the wide variety of data that a gaming system produces and uses.
Massive Scale and High Availability
Astra DB can easily grow to accommodate millions of players. Players do not tolerate lag or stuttering during active play, and they expect their games to be always online, without any downtime. Astra DB’s low read/write latencies at a massive scale, combined with its high-availability, ensures a real-time interactive gaming experience for players when and where they want it.
Multi-model Flexibility and Security for Data
Gaming requires a variety of data that must be managed securely within the gaming platform, such as players’ profiles, their leaderboards, and their in-game currency and purchases. Astra DB supports Document (JSON), REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs and has the multimodel flexibility to manage the wide variety of data in gaming platforms. Player account and session data is secured end-to-end with industry standard TLS connections, data-at-rest encryption bring-your-own-key (BYOK) management.
Data Pipelines for Real-time Gaming
Change Data Capture (CDC) for Astra DB is powered by Astra Streaming and allows the creation of real-time data pipelines for analytics. With CDC, changes to Astra DB data can be immediately sent to machine learning (ML) models and data warehouses (DWH) for analytics to drive recommendations and actions. These integrations enable real-time updates to a game experience such as inventory of in-game virtual products and goods, player metrics and achievements, leaderboards, etc.
Choose Any Cloud
Astra DB is multimodal and globally distributed. Astra DB spans multiple data centers and cloud regions and can be deployed in AWS, GCP and Azure. Astra DB maintains compatibility with open-source Cassandra anywhere and at any scale, allowing players to participate in massive, multiplayer online games all over the world. Additionally, Astra DB also eliminates the overhead of installation and maintenance to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for any gaming platform.