“In 2016, we decided to focus more on developing mobile games. Microservices were the way to go for our core technology and a container set-up seemed ideal for us. We did a lot of research into Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Amazon and Google Cloud. After a year of testing different solutions, we decided that Kubernetes was the best fit. AWS was the most logical platform, as we were already using it.

We made good progress setting up our new environment and were convinced that we had chosen the right solution for our microservices architecture, but we were not satisfied with the level of reliability and scaling that we had achieved. Sometimes we experienced what we called ‘magical issues’ that were resolved by restarting containers. We were determined to upgrade our environment and harden it for true production service quality and reliability.” – Sander Agricola, Lead Developer, GameHouse Technology.

“At GameHouse, the core technology provides back end services required to support in-app purchases, subscriptions, cross promotion and a dynamic paywall. We cannot afford downtime and we have really high standards for response times. From an ops standpoint, we had two major goals:
1. Upgrade our infrastructure and take it to the next level in quality
2. Establish 24/7 support

“To be able to provide 24/7 support, we would need a team of at least five experts. This was overkill for the size of our infrastructure, so we looked into outsourcing. After talking to several companies, we were convinced that Kumina would be the best fit. What we really appreciate about their service model is the unlimited number of support hours for a fixed price. Other companies offer tiers of a certain number of support hours per month, which is a hard thing to predict up front. With Kumina, we knew exactly what to expect. During our conversation, we had a sense that we could trust Kumina, as they were very straightforward and honest in their communication. When we put together the pricing, Kumina was on a par with hiring an expert sysadmin who has Docker, Kubernetes and really good cloud experience. We could hire one genius, or an entire team of really capable people who also provide 24/7 support.” – Markangelo Chiarelli, CTO, GameHouse

Kumina built a new Kubernetes cluster in AWS for GameHouse from scratch. As Kubernetes allows for self-service, GameHouse does not need to consult with Kumina for each and every change. The advanced development pipeline created by GameHouse is used to automatically deploy microservices, first to a staging environment and then, after a full QA round, to the production environment. These deployments happen without downtime, by making full use of the capabilities of Kubernetes to support updates. This process takes place without involvement from Kumina, although we do provide guidance and assistance as needed.

“When we were setting up our environment in-house, we had some great guys working on it but they were also learning as they went. The Kumina team has taken us to a completely new level of expertise, quality of infrastructure and architecture, and implementation process. Their level of support and the willingness to make everything work is amazing. The effort the team puts in to make progress and their responsiveness has been incredible.” – Markangelo Chiarelli, CTO, GameHouse

“If we compare our old set-up to the new set-up that Kumina implemented, it is much better than what we had, so that’s a big plus. Of course, we still sometimes have issues, but now we know what’s happening and why it’s happening. Our ‘magic issues’ are gone and they are not ‘magic’ anymore. The team always investigates and finds the underlying problem in a short time. They really want to understand what’s happening so it won’t happen again, instead of fighting the same fires all the time. We really appreciate this. It feels like the Kumina team are colleagues sitting in the room next to us, we can easily ask ‘hi, can you do this?’ Using Slack is also a part of that, it has a really low barrier and we like this option. Communicating this way makes it feel like Kumina is part of our team, it does not feel like working with an outsourcing vendor at all.” – Sander Agricola, Lead Developer, GameHouse Technology.