Customer Success Story: Aternos
"Thanks to Scaleway's Virtual Cloud Instances and the exceptional customer assistance we experience, expanding our business onto the cloud was a smooth experience." Explains Matthias Neid, CEO of Aternos.
Aternos is a leader in providing on-demand Minecraft game servers, serving more than 77,000,000 players with reliable services on Scaleways public cloud ecosystem. Founded in 2013, the company is wholly funded through ads. It has over 77 million users and over 1 million daily Minecraft players.
To meet the constantly increasing service requests, Aternos relies primarily on Scaleway's Virtual Instances and Elastic Metal Servers. The elasticity of Elastic Metal Servers allows them to have 100% of dedicated resources for their high processing workloads. In peak hours, Aternos can host up to 100,000 Minecraft servers simultaneously, with almost half of those running in the cloud.
Who is Aternos, and what do they do?
Matthiaais Neid founded Aternos in Bonn, Germany. Their business model is simple and relies on offering fully customizable Minecraft servers. Their users have to create an Aternos account and then proceed to start a server. They can also install mods and plugins, configuring the way to experience Minecraft. Aternos also features a real-time console, DDoS protection, custom worlds and automatic backups.
The administration and management of the game servers are mostly through PHP applications. The Minecraft game servers run on-demand in Docker containers. Scaleway Cloud Instances are deployed dynamically depending on the workload on the platform using the Scaleway API and Ansible.
As aforementioned, Aternos faces a highly fluctuating demand for its service. Depending on many external factors, the possibility of using only on-premise or even dedicated servers was not a sustainable solution, both regarding the price and the physical constraints of using dedicated servers. Indeed, using only dedicated machines can lead to long queues during peak hours and underused devices at quieter times.
As a result, Aternos decided to turn to Scaleway's complete ecosystem.
How Scaleway supports Aternos and their traffic increase?
As of today, Aternos uses Scaleway Virtual Instances and benefits from the best price/performance ratio while securely ensuring high availability at all times. They also use Elastic Metal servers to efficiently manage their peak traffic and high demanding workloads. The flexibility and scalability of Scaleway servers allow the company to provide the right amount of computing power to handle their load at any time without wasting resources in off-peak seasons. In addition, Scaleway Elastic Metal servers are equipped with Intel Xeon processors, which offer game-changing performance thanks to cache memory and high processing power. They also boast excellent hyper-threading efficiency.
In 2022, Aternos used more than 500 Elastic Metal servers and launched up to 3.000 instances every day.
What’s next?
The gaming industry is a fast-paced environment, and with nearly 3.2 billion people playing games in 2022, they are spending a combined total of $196.8 billion (according to the Newzoo Global Games Market Report 2022). To catch them up, fast delivery matters, and expanding their game servers into the cloud allowed Aternos to significantly diminish the waiting time for a free slot, decreasing it from several hours to only a few minutes. In other words, Scaleway Cloud Services allow the company to deploy services on-demand when needed without the hassle of deploying dedicated resources that are not in constant use. Resulting in lower operational expenses and business risks, better scalability, and increased performance and reliability.