Customer Success Story : Aternos

"Thanks to Scaleway's virtual cloud instances and the exceptional customer support we've received, our business expansion into the cloud has been a smooth experience," explains Matthias Neid, CEO of Aternos.

Aternos is a leader in providing on-demand Minecraft game servers, serving over 94,000,000 players with reliable services on Scaleway's public cloud ecosystem. Founded in 2013, the company is entirely ad-funded, boasting over 94 million users and more than one million daily Minecraft players.

To meet the ever-growing service demands, Aternos primarily relies on Scaleway's virtual instances and elastic metal servers. The elasticity of the elastic metal servers allows them to have 100% dedicated resources for their intensive workloads. During peak hours, Aternos can host up to 100,000 Minecraft servers simultaneously, with nearly half running in the cloud.

Who is Aternos and what do they do?

Matthias Neid founded Aternos in Bonn, Germany. Their business model is simple and revolves around offering fully customizable Minecraft servers. Users create an Aternos account and then proceed to start a server. They can also install mods and plugins, configuring how they experience Minecraft. Aternos also offers a real-time console, DDoS protection, custom worlds, and automatic backups.

Server administration and management are primarily handled via PHP applications. The Minecraft game servers run on-demand in Docker containers. Scaleway's cloud instances are dynamically deployed based on platform load using the Scaleway API and Ansible.

As previously mentioned, Aternos faces highly fluctuating demand for its services. Due to many external factors, relying solely on on-site or even dedicated servers was not a sustainable solution, both in terms of cost and the physical constraints of using dedicated servers. Indeed, exclusive use of dedicated machines can lead to long queues during peak times and underutilized devices during off-peak hours.

As a result, Aternos decided to turn to Scaleway's complete ecosystem.

How does Scaleway support Aternos and their traffic increase?

Today, Aternos uses Scaleway's virtual instances and benefits from the best value for money while ensuring high availability securely at all times. They also use elastic metal servers to efficiently manage their peak traffic and high-demand workloads. The flexibility and scalability of Scaleway's servers allow the company to provide the appropriate amount of computing power to handle their load at any given time without wasting resources during off-peak periods. Moreover, Scaleway's elastic metal servers are equipped with Intel Xeon processors, offering groundbreaking performance with high cache memory and processing power. They also provide excellent hyper-threading efficiency.

In 2022, Aternos utilized over 500 elastic metal servers and launched up to 3,000 instances each day.

What's next?

The gaming industry is evolving rapidly, and with nearly 3.2 billion people playing games in 2022, they spent a combined total of $196.8 billion (according to Newzoo's 2022 Global Games Market Report). To keep up, quick delivery is essential, and the expansion of their game servers into the cloud has allowed Aternos to significantly reduce waiting times for a free slot, from several hours to just a few minutes. In other words, Scaleway's cloud services enable the company to deploy on-demand services when needed, without the hassle of deploying dedicated resources that are not in constant use. This results in reduced operational expenses and business risks, better scalability, and enhanced performance and reliability.

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