The Game of Big Data: Scalable, Reliable Analytics Infrastructure at KIXEYE

As a maker of real-time strategy games for web and mobile, KIXEYE's business depends on deep insights into how players play our games. By analyzing player behavior in a rich and flexible way, we are able to better target our efforts around user acquisition, game balance, player retention, and game monetization. By storing and analyzing data in standard ways, our data scientists are better able to take learnings from one game and apply them to another.

This session will describe KIXEYE's newly-minted modern analytics infrastructure soup-to-nuts, from Kafka queues through Hadoop 2 to Hive and Redshift. It will outline our efforts around power and flexibility, experimentation and iteration, componentization and testability, and reliability and replayability. It will further share our lessons learned in building, testing, operating, and enhancing this mission-critical piece of our infrastructure.