Don't Dig Down: Hard Lessons Scaling Multiplayer Games

Zed Spencer-Milnes – Managing Director @ Ziax

Don't Dig Down: Hard Lessons Scaling Multiplayer Games

How do you take a hobbyist Minecraft server and productionise it for global scale?

This is the engineering story of CubeCraft Games, founded in 2012, now an official Minecraft partner that has welcomed over 100 million players and serves tens of thousands of concurrent players.

Unlike other UGC platforms like Roblox or Fortnite, we run all the tech and infrastructure ourselves. That means global server fleets, hundreds of software components, our own network, database clusters, orchestration systems - and yes, now even a GraphQL API gateway running on Kubernetes with microservices (buzzword bingo included).

In this talk, you’ll join us as a small group of high school students just trying to keep the server up, and follow how our approach to tech and product evolved to meet player demand. Along the way, we’ll dig into the home-grown solutions that supported that growth - the good, the bad, and the downright ugly (who needs message brokers when you can push gigabits of traffic over a private IRC network?).

Today (and in part 2 of the talk), we’re transforming into a more standardised engineering stack, replacing our “esoteric” tech stack with more standard tools like Kubernetes, Quarkus, and GraphQL. We'll look at our approach to choosing technology and then how we engage and contribute to the upstream open-source communities that we rely on.

Whether you’re into distributed systems, war stories from technical mishaps, or just curious how a small team survived the industry at scale, this is a journey from flying by the seat of our pants to building a sustainable engineering organisation.

Date: Thursday 23rd October
Venue: Bonded Warehouse (M3 4AP)

5pm – doors open (network, have some pizza and grab a drink)
6pm – presentation
7pm – pub / home (please don’t feel bad if you have to leave early)

Pizza and drinks will be provided as usual. If you have any special dietary requirements, please let me know ahead of time.