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
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.
Deliver games with consistent single-digit millisecond performnance, nearly unlimited throughput and storage, and automatic multi-region replication.
Scalable, highly durable, and fully managed database service for operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads
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.
Redis-compatible, durable, in-memory database service for ultra-fast performance.
Build and run identity, knowledge, fraud graph, and other applications with performance, reliability, and simplicity.
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.
Customer stories
See what our customers are achieving by using AWS databases for games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Resources
Incorporating databases into your Game and Game development process can be challenging. Here's how AWS can help you.
AWS Ramp-Up Guide: Database
AWS re:Invent 2021 - Dive deep into database migration services AWS DMS and AWS SCT
AWS re:Invent 2021 - Accelerating data-led migrations
Level Up Your Games with Amazon Aurora
Migrating Your Databases to Amazon Aurora
Databases for Game Developers Webinar
How to Use Databases in Games and Game Development
Best Practices for Deploying Microsoft SQL Server on Level Up Your Games with Amazon EC2
Inventory System for Games with Amazon Aurora Serverless
Modeling Game Player Data with Amazon DynamoDB
Build a real-time leaderboard with Amazon Aurora Serverless and Amazon ElastiCache
Build a friend recommendation engine for games with Amazon Neptune
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:
- Amazon DynamoDB Labs
- Amazon Neptune Workshop
- Amazon Aurora Labs for MySQL
- Amazon Aurora Labs for PostgreSQL
- Amazon DocumentDB Workshop
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.