Pioneer Immersive and Inclusive Gaming Experiences for All Ages
“APISIX is fully open-source with a robust ecosystem, enabling seamless traffic recording and management without impacting user experience.”
Zemiao Yang
,
Backend Engineer at Tencent Timi Studio Group
> 160 million DAU
and 3 million concurrent online users
Top popular MOBA mbile game
is operated stably an effortlessly
Challenges
TiMi is a subsidiary of Tencent Games and the developer of several popular mobile games, including Call of Duty: Mobile, Pokémon Unite, Arena of Valor, and Honor of Kings.
Honor of Kings is one of the world's most popular MOBA mobile games. As of December 2023, it has recorded up to 160 million daily active users, 3 million concurrent online users, over 3.8 billion downloads, and over 300 million registered users. In May 2017, it topped the global mobile game revenue chart.
It encountered several technical challenges while building its business-oriented API gateway.
- The Timi team, inexperienced in operations and aiming to cut costs, seeks to centralize authentication and traffic recording via a business-oriented API gateway.
- The necessity for frequent infrastructure migration in overseas operations makes reliance on cloud-based solutions unfeasible. Hence, all data and components must be migrable.
- Due to the stringent compliance requirements of the overseas business, many internal company components cannot be directly implemented.
- Within Timi, company-specific features such as service discovery, logging, and tracing need to be integrated with APISIX in a balanced way.
Solution
The Tencent Timi Studio Group developed a customized API gateway based on APISIX, TAPISIX, adding a series of plugins designed for their internal technical environment.
- By adopting APISIX's standalone architecture, the Timi team has eliminated dependencies on etcd, which is particularly advantageous in overseas markets where certain cloud services may not be available.
- The team has streamlined the Kubernetes deployment process, leveraging the APISIX Helm Charts, simplifying configuration management, and standardizing the deployment process.
- The team has achieved comprehensive end-to-end observability across their entire system, including metrics and log collecting, tracing, and monitoring. It helps the team quickly identify and resolve issues, ensuring the smooth operation of their services.
- The granular traffic management ensured a better and uninterrupted user experience, enabled an automated backend workflow and canary release, allowing rapid rollback.
Competitive Edge of Our Solution
Rich Features
APISIX provides features: routing, rate limiting, load balancing, service discovery, and observability, offering end-to-end API management capabilities. Timi can use APISIX to manage APIs' entire lifecycle, improving API management efficiency and standardization.
High Scalability
APISIX integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes, which perfectly suits Tencent Timi's environment. Besides, thanks to the scalability of APISIX, Timi can customize its own API gateway based on APISIX by adding a series of plugins designed for their internal technical environment.
Flexible and Migratable
Timi's overseas business infrastructure requires frequent migrations, and all data and components must be migratable. APISIX's architecture and features align with this requirement, allowing Timi to easily migrate its API gateway services during overseas business transitions without impacting existing services.
Active Community Support
As a top-level project under the Apache Software Foundation, APISIX boasts a large and active open-source community. Timi can leverage the community's resources, such as documentation, tutorials, and plugins, to start APISIX quickly.
Results
Database-free Architecture
Tencent Timi has successfully deployed APISIX by utilizing the standalone mode, which eliminates reliance on etcd, making it suitable for overseas scenarios where some cloud providers do not offer etcd services.
Simplified Kubernetes Deployment
The official APISIX Helm Chart templates Kubernetes configuration files, significantly simplifying configuration management.
End-to-End Observability
The team has achieved comprehensive end-to-end observability across their entire system, including metrics and log collecting, tracing, and monitoring. It helps the team quickly identify and resolve issues, ensuring the smooth operation of their services.
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