65.com is a fast-growing online gaming company that serves over 10 million visitors a month by delivering real-time interactive P2P gaming. With its main focus in the China territory, their CTO Jerry implemented mlytics platform alongside with 65.com’s gaming platform to reduce load time by more than 50%. Since implementation, customer satisfaction rose over 60%.
The China Workaround
When the company started, Jerry was looking for a viable option to deliver their application to the end users smoothly within China. His goal is to support the growing demands of their gaming platform within the region while remaining scalability. Jerry soon realized this is a challenging task, as Chinese internet infrastructure is fragmented with different ISPs that doesn’t peer well with each other.
Two obvious options came to Jerry’s mind right away: establish multiple hostings, or use CDN for application delivery while hosting the platform in one place.
Multiple hostings may seem like a straightforward way to do it, but Jerry couldn’t justify the maintenance cost that comes with. “It is just too expensive. We’re still growing and we need something that’s a bit more flexible without all-in commitment.”
Naturally, CDN became a great candidate, until Jerry found out he might need multiple CDNs to actually meet his demand. All IT expert knows that managing multiple CDNs is a huge hassle, especially without any proper management software. “When we’re exploring multiple CDNs for our platform, the first thing that came to my mind is: how can we manage all CDNs effectively?”, Jerry recalls.
Multi CDN, Not Multiple CDNs
Jerry heard about mlytics from his former coworker and was fascinated by the idea of managing multiple CDNs on one platform while the system uses machine learning to optimize application distribution.
mlytics’s “Multi CDN” feature enables Jerry and 65.com to choose multiple CDNs, including China and global CDNs such as Cloudflare, CDNetworks, Akamai, Aliyun, and etc while using them as one. “mlytics platform is smart. It knows which CDN will perform well in a specific region based on real-time performance data. Our platform is now butter smooth,” Jerry says.
Getting More Than Multi CDN
When Jerry implemented mlytics, he was surprised how fast the deployment process was. “It literally took me only 10 minutes to have everything set up correctly, including security.” Jerry didn’t even have to worry about the optimization and traffic distribution because the system is already doing it immediately after implementation.
“What makes mlytics so useable is how they’ve built so many useful solutions around the Multi CDN feature with new approaches,” says Jerry. “For instance, their WebSocket over Multi CDN is heavily secured and it helped us mitigated so many attacks. WebSocket is so critical in the P2P gaming industry, we’re glad we can sleep tight at night.”
The analytic dashboard was also very informative as it provides insight into all CDN status, network performance (via RUM), and security/threats status.
“It’s a real total package for us to scale without compromise,” says Jerry. “We signed up for the mlytics Multi CDN feature hoping to boost the platform performance, and went home with a lot more useful tools and data.”
The interview was taken using Mandarin and translated into English.
