Game Databases

Whether it’s leaderboards, virtual goods, or even cheat detection, players generate a ton of data that needs to be processed, stored, and accessed in real-time. Modernize your data infrastructure with AWS fully managed, purpose-built databases to delight your players.

Choose the right purpose-built database engine for your game workloads

AWS offers 15+ purpose-built engines to support diverse data models, including relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, wide column, and ledger databases.

Purpose-built and battle-tested

Build for games
Choose from AWS's portfolio of 15+ purpose-built databases that support diverse data models and allows you to build use case driven, highly scalable, distributed games.
Available and secure
Built for mission-critical game workloads, AWS Databases offer high availability, reliability, and multiple levels of security including encryption at rest and in-transit.
Performance at scale
Start small and scale as your game grows. Purpose-built databases are optimized for the data model you need, enabling your game to scale and perform better at 1/10 the cost versus commercial databases.
Fully managed
Focus on building your game while AWS continuously monitors your clusters to keep workloads up and running with self-healing storage and automated scaling.

AWS services

MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database that combines the performance, availability of enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

re:Invent Deep Dive on Amazon Aurora »

Deliver games with consistent single-digit millisecond performnance, nearly unlimited throughput and storage, and automatic multi-region replication.

Amazon DynamoDB: Gaming use cases and design patterns »

Scalable, highly durable, and fully managed database service for operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads

Getting Started with Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility) »

Use for caching to accelerates application and database performance, or as a primary data store for use cases that don't require durability such as session stores or gaming leaderboards.

Performance at Scale with Amazon ElastiCache »
Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
Amazon MemoryDB for Redis

Redis-compatible, durable, in-memory database service for ultra-fast performance. 

Get started with a free trial of Amazon MemoryDB for Redis »

Build and run identity, knowledge, fraud graph, and other applications with performance, reliability, and simplicity. 

Graph-based recommendation system with Neptune ML »

Helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely and supports homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations between the most widely used commercial and open-source databases.

An Overview of AWS Cloud Data Migration Services »

Customer stories

See what our customers are achieving by using AWS databases for games.

The Pokemon Company International

The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) Migrates Its Live Database to Aurora PostgreSQL

By migrating its user database and authentication system, Pokémon Trainer Club, to Amazon Aurora, TPCi reduced downtime from 168 hours over a six-month period pre-migration to zero downtime or degradation post-migration.

Watch the presentation » Read the case study »
Migrating the live Pokémon database to Aurora PostgreSQL
How CAPCOM builds fun games fast with containers, data, and ML
CAPCOM

How CAPCOM builds fun games fast with containers, data, and ML

CAPCOM reduced operational costs by 30% using AWS managed services including Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon EKS.

Watch the presentation »

Nintendo Uses Amazon Aurora to Support The Mario Kart Tour
Nintendo

Nintendo Uses Amazon Aurora to Support The Mario Kart Tour

As the launch day kicked off and global traffic intensified, the number of queries recorded across all of Amazon Aurora hit 300,000 per second at its peak.

Read the case study »

Supercell Goes All-In on AWS to Deliver Mobile Games at Scale
Supercell

Supercell Goes All-In on AWS to Deliver Mobile Games at Scale

To move faster and scale games with minimal operational overhead, Supercell migrated its 300 databases to Amazon Aurora.

Watch the video »

Zynga Doubles ETL Performance Using Amazon Redshift
Zynga

Zynga Doubles ETL Performance Using Amazon Redshift

By migrating its data warehouse to Amazon Redshift, Zynga doubled extract, transform, and load (ETL) performance, easily scales to process over 5.3 TB of game data generated each day

Watch the video »

Get started with AWS Databases

Learn how to use databases for game workloads with step-by-step tutorials, technical guides, and webinars with AWS for Games experts.

Modeling Game Player Data with Amazon DynamoDB

Imagine you are building an online multiplayer game, such as a battle royale game. In your game, groups of players join a session to play a game, and you have to update a specific player’s record to indicate the amount of time the player has been playing, the number of kills they’ve recorded, or whether they won the game. Users want to see old games they’ve played, either to view the games’ winners or to watch a replay of each game’s action.

Amazon DynamoDB is a popular database service modelling game player data because it is designed for high-scale use cases where consistent performance is critical as your game grows. Amazon DynamoDB scales to more than 100 TB with no performance degradation. It is accessible over HTTP(S), and uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication. You don’t need to manage servers and apply patches to any infrastructure and Amazon DynamoDB handles upgrades, backups, and other administrative tasks, so that you can focus on developing your game.

In this lab, you learn advanced data modeling patterns in Amazon DynamoDB. When using DynamoDB, it is important to consider how you will access your data (your access patterns) before you model your data. We walk through an example multiplayer game, discuss the access patterns in the game, and show how to design a DynamoDB table to handle the access patterns by using secondary indexes and transactions.

Get started now »

Build an Inventory System for Games with Amazon Aurora Serverless

Build an Inventory System for Games with Amazon Aurora Serverless

When building a massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), players need to find, purchase and sell items. In this lab, you learn how to use Amazon Aurora Serverless to build the inventory system in your game.

Start building now »

Build a real-time leaderboard with Amazon Aurora Serverless and Amazon ElastiCache

Build a real-time leaderboard with Amazon Aurora Serverless and Amazon ElastiCache

Imagine you are building a mobile game where users race to solve puzzles. In this lab, you learn how to build a scalable, real-time leaderboard for a multiplayer game using Amazon Aurora Serverless and Amazon ElastiCache.

Learn more »

Build a friend recommendation engine for games with Amazon Neptune

Build a friend recommendation engine for games with Amazon Neptune

Players often want to follow other players as a way to make friends, track their progress, and find opponents to play against. Learn how to build a friend recommendation engine for a multiplayer game using Amazon Neptune.

Start building now »

Build a turn-based game with Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon SNS

Build a turn-based game with Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon SNS

In this lab, you learn how to build a multiplayer, turn-based strategy game using Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

Get started »

Get AWS Databases to support your game

Databases are an integral part of game development. But, as a game developer, you want to dedicate all your time and expertise to building great games, not engineering databases. Here's a few steps that can help you get started.

Ramp-Up Guide on Databases

The Ramp-Up Guide on Databases teaches data engineers and database administrators about AWS' relational and nonrelational database services and how to choose which database is the best choice for your solution. You'll also learn how to migrate your on-premises databases to an AWS-managed database service.

This guide can also help prepare you for the AWS Certified Database – Specialty certification exam. If you're specifically interested in digital course sand labs to help you develop these skills, explore the four Database Learning Plans at explore.skillbuilder.aws.

AWS Database Workshops

AWS provides workshops to help you get started on our Databases offering:

You can find more workshops on workshops.aws.

Purpose-built Databases Training

In this course, you learn how to provision and use five different purpose-built databases in an application. First, you learn about why you would want to use purpose-built databases and the factors to consider when choosing a database. Then you can view five walkthrough examples of choosing purpose-built databases when building applications with Amazon Web Services.

Follow the AWS for Games Blog

The AWS for Games blog has frequent posts on all topics game technolofies related, including Databases:

After what we shared above, get in touch with your Solutions Architect or engage a partner in your area to run a Well-Architected Review with you. We introduced a new Games Industry Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which delivers tailored recommendations for cloud-based games based on our experiences and lessons learned supporting these unique workloads.