24/7 Maintenance and Support of Linux Cloud Servers

Customer

The Customer is Europe’s leading producer and marketer of digital media products, including video games, movies and software, with a strong distribution portfolio in Europe and the United States as well as partners all over the globe. The Company has been developing, publishing and distributing video games since 1994. They have published more than 200 games for such platforms as the PC, consoles, tablets and smartphones.

Challenge

One of the Customer’s cloud-based .NET applications – a popular online game – was running on 20 Linux servers. The servers would regularly run out of memory and disk space, which caused poor gaming performance. The Customer used a custom server-monitoring system which was not proactive, meaning that it could not deliver status notifications, predictions and warnings. Taking into account a rich experience in custom web development, ScienceSoft was commissioned to provide 24/7 support and maintenance to ensure that all players enjoy the game to the fullest.

Solution

To answer the Customer’s needs, ScienceSoft Support Engineers took over two main scopes of activities:

• Responding to the requests from the Customer’s development and testing teams when the latter experienced a decrease in server performance
• Regularly checking (2-3 times per day) the Customer’s server-monitoring system to verify that the servers were in a consistent state

A server’s inconsistent state can manifest itself in different forms: the CPU, or memory, or disk storage, is overloaded or there is no response from the server. Be it any of these issues, the player experience is affected significantly. Therefore, ScienceSoft concentrates on keeping the Customer’s infrastructure in an adequate and secure condition by performing server reboots, log deletions and other actions. The engineers follow a number of specified guidelines to adjust the servers to the default settings. The support and maintenance are provided on a 24/7 basis.

Results

The Customer has a full and uninterrupted control over the servers, which allows to considerably improve the end-user experience.

Technologies and Tools

Linux, .NET, a custom server-monitoring system.