A social game, by it's very nature, can spread very quickly to a large user population. Because the game is typically interactive, the speed of retrieving information needed for the user's interactions with the system is critical. When building their new game Animal Party, the developers at Tribal Crossing needed to get away from the complexity of sharding an SQL database. They also were looking for a solution to the administration cost associated with the operation of traditional data stores. When evaluating multiple different NoSQL solutions, they realized that Couchbase's Membase server meets most of their critical requirements in developing their game software. Simple to use, Couchbase's model allows Tribal Crossing to easily model their game interactions with the key/value data store. Fast read and write performance is required with interactive, social games, and they found that support in Membase as well. Elastic scalability is easily achieved by simply adding more nodes to the Couchbase cluster without any modifications required to the application. Relying on Couchbase's technology Tribal Crossing has been able to quickly build and scale Animal Party with a small team and no dedicated system administrators. http://sdec.kr/

1. 1

2. USING
COUCHBASE
FOR
SOCIAL
GAME
SCALING
AND
SPEED
Chiyoung Seo, Couchbase Inc.
Matt Ingenthron, Couchbase Inc.
2

3. Agenda
• Introduc-on
• What
is
Couchbase
Server?
– Simple,
Fast,
Elas-c
– Technology
Overview
(Architecture,
data
flow,
rebalancing)
• Tribal
Crossing
Inc:
Animal
Party
– Challenges
before
Couchbase
• Original
Architecture
– Why
Couchbase?
• Simplicity
• Performance
• Flexibility
– Deploying
Couchbase
• New
Architecture
• EC2
• Data
Model
• Accessing
data
in
Couchbase
• Product
Roadmap
• Q&A
3

4. Couchbase
Inc.
• Membase
and
CouchOne
have
merged
to
form
Couchbase
Inc.
(headquartered
in
Silicon
Valley)
• Team
– Brings
together
the
creators
and
core
contributors
of
Memcached,
Membase
and
CouchDB
technologies
– Doubles
technical
team
size,
accelerates
roadmaps
by
over
a
year
• Products
– Couchbase
Server
(Formerly
Membase)
– Couchbase
Single
Server
– Mobile
Couchbase
(iPhone
and
Android)
• Technology
– Most
mature,
reliable
and
widely
deployed
NoSQL
technologies
– Fully
featured,
open
source
document
datastore
– First
complete,
end-­‐to-­‐end
NoSQL
database
product
4

5. Modern Interactive Web Application Architecture
Application Scales Out
Just add more commodity web servers
www.facebook.com/animalparty
Load
Balancer
Web
Servers
Rela-onal
Database Scales Up
Get a bigger, more complex server
Database
-­‐
Expensive
and
disrup-ve
sharding
-­‐
Doesn’t
perform
at
Web
Scale
5

6. Couchbase
Server
is
a
distributed
database
Couchbase
Web
Console
Applica-on
user
Web
applica-on
server
Couchbase
Servers
6

7. Couchbase data layer scales like application logic tier
Data layer now scales with linear cost and constant performance.
Application Scales Out
www.facebook.com/animalparty
Just add more commodity web servers
Load
Balancer
Web
Servers
Couchbase
Servers
Database Scales Out
Just add more commodity data servers
Horizontally
scalable,
schema-­‐less,
auto-­‐sharding,
high-­‐performance
at
Web
Scale
Scaling out flattens the cost and performance curves. 7

8. Couchbase
Server
is
Simple,
Fast,
Elas-c
• Five
minutes
or
less
to
a
working
cluster
– Downloads
for
Windows,
Linux
and
OSX
– Start
with
a
single
node
– One
bucon
press
joins
nodes
to
a
cluster
• Easy
to
develop
against
– Just
SET
and
GET
–
no
schema
required
– Drop
it
in.
10,000+
exis-ng
applica-ons
already
“speak
Couchbase”
(via
memcached)
– Prac-cally
every
language
and
applica-on
framework
is
supported,
out
of
the
box
• Easy
to
manage
– One-­‐click
failover
and
cluster
rebalancing
– Graphical
and
programma-c
interfaces
– Configurable
aler-ng
8

9. Couchbase
Server
is
Simple,
Fast,
Elas-c
• Predictable
– “Never
keep
an
applica-on
wai-ng”
– Quasi-­‐determinis-c
latency
and
throughput
• Low
latency
– Built-­‐in
Memcached
technology
– Auto-­‐migra-on
of
hot
data
to
lowest
latency
storage
technology
(RAM,
SSD,
Disk)
– Selectable
write
behavior
–
asynchronous,
synchronous
(on
replica-on,
persistence)
• High
throughput
– Mul--­‐threaded
– Low
lock
conten-on
– Asynchronous
wherever
possible
– Automa-c
write
de-­‐duplica-on
9

10. Couchbase
Server
is
Simple,
Fast,
Elas-c
• Zero-­‐down-me
elas-city
Couchbase
Web
Console
– Spread
I/O
and
data
across
commodity
servers
(or
VMs)
– Consistent
performance
with
linear
cost
– Dynamic
rebalancing
of
a
live
cluster
• All
nodes
are
created
equal
– No
special
case
nodes
– Clone
to
grow
• Extensible
– Change
feeds
– Real-­‐-me
map-­‐reduce
– RESTful
interface
for
management
10

11. Proven
at
Small,
and
Extra
Large
Scale
• Leading cloud service (PAAS) • Social game leader – FarmVille,
provider Mafia Wars, Empires and Allies,
• Over 150,000 hosted applications Café World, FishVille
• Couchbase Server serving over • Over 230 million monthly users
6,200 Heroku customers • Couchbase Server is the primary
database behind key Zynga
properties
11

12. Customers
and
Partners
Customers
(par-al
lis-ng)
Partners
12

13. Couchbase
Server
Architecture
11211
11210
memcapable
1.0
memcapable
2.0
moxi
REST
management
API/Web
UI
vBucket
state
and
replica-on
manager
Global
singleton
supervisor
Rebalance
orchestrator
Configura-on
manager
memcached
Node
health
monitor
Process
monitor
protocol
listener/sender
Heartbeat
Data
Manager
Cluster
Manager
engine
interface
Couchbase
Storage
Engine
hcp
on
each
node
one
per
cluster
Erlang/OTP
HTTP
erlang
port
mapper
distributed
erlang
8091
4369
21100
–
21199
13

14. Couchbase
Server
Architecture
11211
11210
memcapable
1.0
memcapable
2.0
moxi
vBucket
state
and
replica-on
manager
REST
management
API/Web
UI
Global
singleton
supervisor
Rebalance
orchestrator
Configura-on
manager
memcached
Node
health
monitor
Process
monitor
protocol
listener/sender
Heartbeat
engine
interface
Couchbase
Storage
Engine
hcp
on
each
node
one
per
cluster
Erlang/OTP
HTTP
erlang
port
mapper
distributed
erlang
8091
4369
21100
–
21199
14

15. Couchbase
“write”
Data
Flow
–
applica-on
view
User
ac-on
results
in
the
need
to
change
the
VALUE
of
KEY
1
Applica-on
updates
key’s
VALUE,
2
performs
SET
opera-on
4
Couchbase
client
hashes
KEY,
iden-fies
3
KEY’s
master
server
SET
request
sent
over
network
to
master
server
5
Couchbase
replicates
KEY-­‐VALUE
pair,
caches
it
in
memory
and
stores
it
to
disk
15

16. Couchbase
Data
Flow
–
under
the
hood
SET
request
arrives
at
SET
acknowledgement
KEY’s
master
server
1
3
returned
to
applica-on
Listener-­‐Sender
2
2
Listener-­‐Sender
Listener-­‐Sender
RAM* RAM*
RAM*
Couchbase
storage
engine
membase
storage
engine
membase
storage
engine
2
SSD SSD SSD SSD SSD SSD
SSD
SSD
SSD
Disk Disk Disk
4
Disk Disk Disk
Disk
Disk
Disk
Replica
Server
1
for
KEY
Master
server
for
KEY
Replica
Server
2
for
KEY
16

17. Elas-city
-­‐
Rebalancing
Node
1
Node
2
Node
3
Before
vBucket
1
vBucket
7
vBucket
2
vBucket
8
• Adding
Node
3
vBucket
3
vBucket
9
• Node
3
is
in
pending
state
vBucket
4
vBucket
10
Pending
state
• Clients
talk
to
Node
1,2
only
vBucket
5
vBucket
11
vBucket
6
vBucket
12
vBucket
1
vBucket
7
During
vBucket
2
vBucket
8
vBucket
3
vBucket
9
• Rebalancing
orchestrator
recalculates
Rebalancing
vBucket
4
vBucket
10
the
vBucket
map
(including
replicas)
vBucket
5
vBucket
11
• Migrate
vBuckets
to
the
new
server
vBucket
6
vBucket
12
• Finalize
migra-on
vBucket
migrator
vBucket
migrator
Client
AOer
vBucket
1
vBucket
7
vBucket
5
• Node
3
is
balanced
vBucket
2
vBucket
8
vBucket
6
• Clients
are
reconfigured
to
talk
to
vBucket
3
vBucket
9
vBucket
11
Node
3
vBucket
4
vBucket
10
vBucket
12
17

18. Data
buckets
are
secure
Couchbase
“slices”
Applica-on
user
Web
applica-on
server
Bucket
1
Bucket
2
Aggregate
Cluster
Memory
and
Disk
Capacity
Couchbase
data
servers
In
the
data
center
On
the
administrator
console
18

19. Couchbase
and
Hadoop
Integra-on
• Support
large-­‐scale
analy-cs
on
applica-on
data
by
streaming
data
from
Couchbase
to
Hadoop
– Real-­‐-me
integra-on
using
Flume
– Batch
integra-on
using
Sqoop
• Examples
– Various
game
sta-s-cs
(e.g.,
monthly
/
daily
/
hourly
rankings)
– Analyze
game
pacerns
from
users
to
enhance
various
game
metrics
Flume
memcached
TAP
protocol
listener/sender
Sqoop
engine
interface
Couchbase
Storage
Engine
19

20. Agenda
• Introduc-on
• What
is
Couchbase
Server?
– Simple,
Fast,
Elas-c
– Technology
Overview
(Architecture,
data
flow,
rebalancing)
• Tribal
Crossing
Inc:
Animal
Party
– Challenges
before
Couchbase
• Original
Architecture
– Why
Couchbase?
• Simplicity
• Performance
• Flexibility
– Deploying
Couchbase
• New
Architecture
• EC2
• Data
Model
• Accessing
data
in
Couchbase
• Product
Roadmap
• Q&A
20

21. Tribal
Crossing:
Challenges
Common
steps
on
scaling
up
database:
● Tune
queries
(indexing,
explain
query)
● Denormaliza-on
● Cache
data
(APC
/
Memcache)
● Tune
MySQL
configura-on
● Replica-on
(read
slaves)
Where
do
we
go
from
here
to
prepare
for
the
scale
of
a
successful
social
game?
21

22. Tribal
Crossing:
Challenges
● Write-­‐heavy
requests
– Caching
does
not
help
– MySQL
/
InnoDB
limita-on
(Percona)
● Need
to
scale
dras-cally
over
night
– My
Polls
–
100
to
1m
users
over
a
weekend
● Small
team,
no
dedicated
sysadmin
– Focus
on
what
we
do
best
–
making
games
● Keeping
cost
down
22

23. Tribal
Crossing:
“Old”
Architecture
and
Op-ons
● MySQL
with
master-­‐to-­‐master
replica-on
and
sharding
– Complex
to
setup,
high
administra-on
cost
– Requires
applica-on
level
changes
● Cassandra
– High
write,
but
low
read
throughput
– Live
cluster
reconfigura-on
and
rebalance
is
quite
complicated
– Eventual
consistency
gives
too
much
burden
to
applica-on
developers
● MongoDB
– High
read/write,
but
unpredictable
latency
– Live
cluster
rebalance
for
exis-ng
nodes
only
– Eventual
consistency
with
slave
nodes
23

24. Tribal
Crossing:
Why
Couchbase
Server?
● SPEED,
SPEED,
SPEED
● Immediate
consistency
● Interface
is
dead
simple
to
use
– We
are
already
using
Memcache
● Low
sysadmin
overhead
● Schema-­‐less
data
store
● Used
and
Proven
by
big
guys
like
Zynga
● …
and
lastly,
because
Tribal
CAN
– Bigger
firms
with
legacy
code
base
=
hard
to
adapt
– Small
team
=
ability
to
get
on
the
cuung
edge
24

25. Tribal
Crossing:
New
Challenges
With
Couchbase
● But,
there
are
some
different
challenges
in
using
Couchbase
(currently
1.7)
to
handle
the
game
data:
– No
easy
way
to
query
data
– No
transac-on
/
rollback
➔ Couchbase
Server
2.0
resolves
them
by
using
CouchDB
as
the
underlying
database
engine
● Can
this
work
for
an
online
game?
– Break
out
of
the
old
ORM
/
rela-onal
paradigm!
– We
are
not
handling
bank
transac-ons
25

26. Tribal
Crossing:
Deploying
Couchbase
in
EC2
Web Server
Apache ● Basic
produc-on
Client-side Moxi
environment
setup
● Dev/Stage
environment
–
feel
free
to
install
Cluster Mgmt. Requests
Couchbase
on
your
web
DNS Entry
server
Couchbase …
Couchbase
Couchbase Cluster
26

27. Tribal
Crossing:
Deploying
Couchbase
in
EC2
Web Server
● Amazon
Linux
AMI,
Apache 64-­‐bit,
EBS
backed
instance
Client-side Moxi ● Setup
swap
space
Cluster Mgmt. Requests
● Install
Couchbase’s
Membase
Server
1.7
DNS Entry ● Access
web
console
http://<hostname>:8091
● Start
the
new
cluster
with
a
…
Couchbase
single
node
Couchbase
● Add
the
other
nodes
to
the
Couchbase Cluster cluster
and
rebalance
27

28. Tribal
Crossing:
Deploying
Couchbase
in
EC2
Web Server
Apache Moxi
figures
out
which
node
in
the
cluster
holds
data
for
a
given
key.
Client-side Moxi
● On
each
web
server,
install
Moxi
Cluster Mgmt. Requests
proxy
● Start
Moxi
by
poin-ng
it
to
the
DNS Entry
DNS
entry
you
created
● Web
apps
connect
to
Moxi
that
is
running
locally
memcache->addServer(‘localhost’,
11211);
Couchbase …
Couchbase
Couchbase Cluster
28

29. Tribal
Crossing:
Represen-ng
Game
Data
in
Couchbase
Use
case
-­‐
simple
farming
game:
● A
player
can
have
a
variety
of
plants
on
their
farm.
● A
player
can
add
or
remove
plants
from
their
farm.
● A
Player
can
see
what
plants
are
on
another
player's
farm.
29

30. Tribal
Crossing:
Represen-ng
Game
Data
in
Couchbase
RepresenUng
Objects
● Simply
treat
an
object
as
an
associa-ve
array
● Determine
the
key
for
an
object
using
the
class
name
(or
type)
of
the
object
and
an
unique
ID
RepresenUng
Object
Lists
● Denormaliza-on
● Save
a
comma
separated
list
or
an
array
of
object
IDs
30

31. Tribal
Crossing:
Represen-ng
Game
Data
in
Couchbase
Player
Object
Key: 'Player1' Plant
Object
Array Key: 'Plant201'
(
[Id] => 1 Array
[Name] => Shawn (
) [Id] => 201
[Player_Id] => 1
[Name] => Starflower
PlayerPlant
List
)
Key: 'Player1_PlantList'
Array
(
[0] => 201
[1] => 202
[2] => 204
)
31

32. Tribal
Crossing:
Schema-­‐less
Game
Data
● No
need
to
“ALTER
TABLE”
● Add
new
“fields”
all
objects
at
any
-me
– Specify
default
value
for
missing
fields
– Increased
development
speed
● Using
JSON
for
data
objects
though,
owing
to
the
ability
to
query
on
arbitrary
fields
in
Couchbase
2.0
32

33. Tribal
Crossing:
Accessing
Game
Data
in
Couchbase
Get
all
plants
belong
to
a
given
player
Request: GET /player/1/farm
$plant_ids = couchbase->get('Player1_PlantList');
$response = array();
foreach ($plant_ids as $plant_id)
{
$plant = couchbase->get('Plant' . $plant_id);
$response[] = $plant;
}
echo json_encode($response);
33

34. Tribal
Crossing:
Modifying
Game
Data
in
Couchbase
Give
a
player
a
new
plant
// Create the new plant
$new_plant = array (
'id' => 100,
'name' => 'Mushroom'
);
$couchbase->set('Plant100', $new_plant);
// Update the player plant list
$plant_ids = $couchbase->get('Player1_PlantList');
$plant_ids[] = $new_plant['id'];
$couchbase->set('Player1_PlantList', $plant_ids);
34

35. Tribal
Crossing:
Concurrency
Concurrency
issue
can
occur
when
mul-ple
requests
are
working
with
the
same
piece
of
data.
Solu-on:
● CAS
(check-­‐and-­‐set)
– Client
can
know
if
someone
else
has
modified
the
data
while
you
are
trying
to
update
– Implement
op-mis-c
concurrency
control
● Locking
(try/wait
cycle)
– GETL
(get
with
lock
+
-meout)
opera-ons
– Pessimis-c
concurrency
control
35

36. Tribal
Crossing:
Data
Rela-onship
● Record
object
rela-onships
both
ways
– Example:
Plots
and
Plants
● Plot
object
stores
id
of
the
plant
that
it
hosts
● Plant
object
stores
id
of
the
plot
that
it
grows
on
– Resolu-on
in
case
of
mismatch
● Don't
sweat
the
extra
calls
to
load
data
in
a
one-­‐to-­‐
many
rela-onship
– Use
mul3Get
– We
can
s-ll
cache
aggregated
results
in
a
Memcache
bucket
if
needed
36

37. Tribal
Crossing:
Migra-ng
to
Couchbase
Servers
First
migrated
large
or
slow
performing
tables
and
frequently
updated
fields
from
MySQL
to
Couchbase
Web
Server
Apache
+
PHP
Client-­‐side
Moxi
MySQL
memcached
TAP
protocol
listener/sender
engine
interface
Repor-ng
TAP
Client
Applica-ons
Couchbase
Storage
Engine
37

38. Tribal
Crossing:
Deployment
38

39. Tribal
Crossing:
Deployment
39

40. Tribal
Crossing:
Conclusion
• Significantly
reduced
the
cost
incurred
by
scaling
up
database
servers
and
managing
them.
• Achieved
significant
improvements
in
various
performance
metrics
(e.g.,
read,
write,
latency,
etc.)
• Allowed
them
to
focus
more
on
game
development
and
op-mizing
key
metrics
• Plan
to
use
real-­‐-me
MapReduce,
querying,
and
indexing
abili-es
provided
by
the
upcoming
Elas-c
Couchbase
2.0
40

41. Agenda
• Introduc-on
• What
is
Couchbase
Server?
– Simple,
Fast,
Elas-c
– Technology
Overview
(Architecture,
data
flow,
rebalancing)
• Tribal
Crossing
Inc:
Animal
Party
– Challenges
before
Couchbase
• Original
Architecture
– Why
Couchbase?
• Simplicity
• Performance
• Flexibility
– Deploying
Couchbase
• New
Architecture
• EC2
• Data
Model
• Accessing
data
in
Couchbase
• Product
Roadmap
• Q&A
41

42. Product
Roadmap:
Couchbase
Server
2.0
• Mobile
to
cloud
data
synchroniza-on
• Cross
data
center
replica-on
US
West
Coast
Data
Center
US
East
Coast
Data
Center
Couchbase
Couchbase
Server
CouchSync
Server
CouchSync
CouchSync
Couchbase
Single
Server
Couchbase
Single
Server
CouchSync
CouchSync
…
…
… … … …
42

43. Product
Roadmap:
Couchbase
Server
2.0
• Replace
Sqlite-­‐based
storage
engine
with
CouchDB
• Support
indexing
and
querying
on
values
• Integrate
real-­‐-me
MapReduce
into
Couchbase
server
• SDK
for
Couchbase
server
Membase
Server
1.7
CouchDB
1.1
Couchbase
Server
2.0
The
world’s
leading
caching
The
most
reliable
and
full-­‐ The
fastest,
most
complete
and
and
clustering
technology
featured
document
database
most
reliable
database
on
the
planet
43

44. Couchbase
Product
Download
• Community
Edi-on
– Open
source
build
– Free
forum
support
• Enterprise
Edi-on
– Free
for
non-­‐produc-on
use
– Cer-fied,
QA
tested
version
of
open
source
– Case
tracking
and
guaranteed
SLA
for
produc-on
environments
• Partner
in
Korea
– N2M
Inc.
(hcp://www.n2m.co.kr)
44

45. Q&A
Matt Ingenthron, Couchbase Inc.
(matt@couchbase.com, @ingenthr)
Chiyoung Seo, Couchbase Inc.
(chiyoung@couchbase.com, @chiyoungseo)
45