This is part four of a fivefour-part series on scaling game servers with Kubernetes. In the previous three posts, we hosted our game servers on Kubernetes, measured and limited their resource usage, and scaled up the nodes in our cluster based on that usage. Now we need to tackle the harder problem: scaling down the […]

This is part three of a fivefour-part series on scaling game servers with Kubernetes. In the previous two posts we looked at hosting dedicated game servers on Kubernetes and measuring and limiting their memory and CPU resources. In this instalment we look at how we can use the CPU information from the previous post to […]

This is part two of afivefour-part serieson scaling game servers with Kubernetes. In the part 1 of this series, we looked at how we could take our dedicated game server, containerise it with Docker, and then host and manage it on Kubernetes, which was an excellent start. However since our Kubernetes clusters are generally of […]

This is part one of afivefour-part serieson scaling game servers with Kubernetes. For the past year and a half, Ive been researching and building a variety of multiplayer games. Particularly those in the MMO or FPS genres, as they have some unique and very interesting requirements for communication protocols and scaling strategies. Due to my [̷...

If you are a game developer that works on any kind of mobile, multiplayer or online internet connected game, you may want to attend Google Clouds premier conference in San Francisco, Cloud NEXT, especially since it is conveniently timed right after GDC. Even if you arent attending GDC, if you are building any backend infrastructure […]

Earlier this year, I had the honour of presenting at Google I/O 2016, on how to build multiplayer games with Firebase. If you aren't familiar with Firebase, it's a fantastic Backend-as-a-Service that has several features, most notably the Realtime Database, thatcan cut down the amount of time for certain types of games quite drastically. In […...

A little while ago, I passed my first year mark of working for Google. This also marked the first anniversary of me moving from a (long?) career as a software engineer, into a full time position in Developer Relations, and more specifically Developer Advocacy. I wanted to write a post about this, as when I often talk […]

This release of Brute, provides no new features, but is instead a migration from using CLJX as the support for both Clojure and ClojureScript at once, to upgrading to Clojure 1.7, and utilising the (relatively?) new feature of Reader Conditionals. In terms of changing the implementing code, this was a fairly straightforward task. It was essentially...

Late last year I was invited to participate in a panel discussion at New Relic's FutureStack conference on using Software Containers (which generally means Docker) in production environments.  We had an excellent discussion about what is good about the ecosystem, as well as what needs to improve, as well as best practices and approaches for running...

A few weeks ago, I had the distinct opportunity to attend and present at clojure/conj in Philadelphia. This was the first time for me attending the event, but it had been on my list of conferences to be at for a very long time.  Now that I live in San Francisco, it's great that I […]

Last month I had the pleasure of presentation at the Connect.js conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on scaling Node.js with Docker and Kubernetes. I really enjoyed the conference, and giving this talk. I feel that Kubernetes really shows the power of what software containers can do to give generic solutions to general application development problems l...

I recently had the pleasure of doing a short presentation to the Bay Area Clojure User Group on Wrapping Clojure Tooling in Containers. We went from having no Clojure tooling, and Java 7 on my host machine, to quickly firing up a new terminal shell running in a Docker container with Leiningen pre-installed along with Java 8. This […]

When I started working with Google App Engine and Go, I wasn’t sure how to best configure my GOPATH when developing Google App Engine applications.  You can find documentation on this aspect on the Go and App Engine page, but being new to both Go and App Engine I was not aware of what options were […]

Since I am now working for Google, and specifically the Google Cloud Platform, I took the opportunity to test out our Cloud Launcher offerings to migrate this blog over to the Cloud Platform as quickly as possible. This site runs on WordPress, mainly because I found it the easiest to migrate all the content I have […]

I guess I must have decided that life was too simple and boring, and I needed to change pretty much every aspect of my life. In just under a week, I'll be moving my entire family up to the Bay Area in California from our home here in Melbourne Australia, and shortly thereafter joining the […]

I've been having lots of fun this break getting back into writing a top down racing game that I had originally started (way) earlier in the year, so I thought I would start writing a little dev diary on it, to aid me in keeping up my momentum in developing it.  It's still very much in the prototype phase, […]