Best Practices for Building a Data Lake on AWS for Games

Publication date: May 11, 2022 (Document revisions)

Abstract

Many customers run their Digital Games on AWS. Each of them has made unique design choices that allow them to run the fastest, most complex, and visually breathtaking games on AWS. This whitepaper outlines best practices for building a data lake for games on the AWS Cloud, and offers a reference architecture to guide organizations in the delivery of these complex systems.

Are you Well-Architected?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make when building systems in the cloud. The six pillars of the Framework allow you to learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems. Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available at no charge in the AWS Management Console (sign-in required), you can review your workloads against these best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.

In the Games Industry Lens, we focus on designing, architecting, and deploying your games workloads on AWS.

For more expert guidance and best practices for your cloud architecture—reference architecture deployments, diagrams, and whitepapers—refer to the AWS Architecture Center.

Introduction

The gaming industry is more competitive than ever before, with thousands of titles published every year, all competing for players’ time and attention. Building a successful game in today’s market is a challenging endeavor, and it takes an enormous amount of work. Building an integrated data platform to effectively analyze player data helps game developers better understand player behavior and business performance, enable timely and data-driven decision making, and delight players. Today, more and more game developers are building data lakes on AWS to achieve these business outcomes.

This whitepaper provides an in-depth discussion of best practices for building a data lake on AWS for games. It aims to help game developers maximize the value of their player data to achieve better game design, development, monetization insights, and strategies.