Igloo Studio: Real-Time Multiplayer Gaming Platform Migration from GCP to AWS

Customer Background

Igloo Studio is a prominent online video gaming company focused on delivering innovative, competitive, and immersive digital gaming experiences to a global audience. Its core business revolves around real-time multiplayer games that are highly interactive and performance-sensitive, catering to both casual and professional gamers. With a rapidly growing user base driven by mobile-first engagement, its portfolio spans mobile games, browser-based games, and downloadable client-based platforms — all requiring robust, low-latency backend infrastructure. The platform previously ran on GCP across four environments using Compute Engine virtual machines, Cloud SQL for MySQL (HA), and Cloud Storage buckets.

Business Challenge

While Igloo Studio successfully operated its gaming platform on GCP, the company faced critical operational and strategic challenges that hindered its ability to scale, innovate, and maintain a competitive edge — increasingly apparent as user demand for real-time responsiveness, global reach, and system reliability intensified.

Key Challenges:

• Manual Scaling & Limited Elasticity: Heavy reliance on manually scaled virtual machines restricted the platform's ability to respond to traffic surges during major gaming events, promotions, and new game releases
• No Deployment Automation: Code deployments, system patches, and configuration changes were performed manually across all environments, causing configuration drift, prolonged release cycles, and human error
• Limited Observability: No centralized view across environments or advanced alerting, hindering proactive anomaly detection and rapid troubleshooting during peak periods
• Poor Cost Visibility: Shared storage, bandwidth, and compute spread across environments made it difficult to monitor spending trends, enforce budgets, or optimize costs
• Security & Compliance Gaps: Manual access control, decentralized firewall rules, and limited audit logging made consistent security policy enforcement difficult as international expansion loomed

AWS Solution

DG Global Technology designed a modern, secure, and scalable architecture built around a multi-account AWS Organization. Each environment is isolated with its own Amazon VPC and connected via AWS Transit Gateway for secure, high-speed cross-account communication. All infrastructure provisioning is codified with Terraform, ensuring consistent, version-controlled, repeatable deployments.

AWS Services Utilized

Architecture Highlights

• Multi-Account Strategy: Four isolated AWS accounts (Production, Development, CI/CD, Management) with strong governance boundaries while preserving team agility
• Infrastructure as Code: Entire Landing Zone — VPCs, NAT Gateway, Transit Gateway, IAM policies, and logging — provisioned and version-controlled with Terraform
• Centralized CI/CD: Dedicated CI/CD account with CodePipeline and supporting tooling for building, testing, and deploying across environments with full auditability
• Phased Migration Waves: Development workloads migrated first, followed by production systems — each wave with testing, data validation, and stakeholder approval
• Security by Design: Central management account enforcing IAM access control, CloudTrail API auditing, CloudWatch alerting, and Firewall Manager policies organization-wide

Solution Architecture: Existing vs New

Implementation Details

Engagement Start Date: July 5, 2025
Engagement End Date (Migration Delivery): August 20, 2025
Managed Services: Ongoing AWS managed services under agreement following migration (6+ months minimum)
Project Status: In production (not pilot / proof of concept)

Timeline: Mobilize phase July 5, 2025 – August 20, 2025
Team Size: DG Global Technology engineers (Solution Architects, Cloud Engineers, DevOps Engineers) + Igloo Studio technical stakeholders across development, operations, security, and support
Migration Strategy: Rehost (Compute Engine to EC2 via MGN) + Replatform (Cloud SQL to Aurora MySQL via DMS, Cloud Storage to S3, containerization to EKS)

Key Implementation Phases

• Discovery & Application Assessment: Inventoried all GCP resources across the four environments, classified workloads, and produced a validated inventory and workload classification matrix with the AWS SA team
• Landing Zone Deployment: Built the secure multi-account AWS foundation — VPCs, NAT Gateway, Transit Gateway, IAM policies, and centralized logging — entirely through Terraform
• Pilot Migration: Migrated pilot EC2, Aurora, and S3 workloads per account to validate performance and process before full waves
• Wave-Based Migration: Migrated workloads in waves grouped by environment, criticality, and dependencies, each with defined change windows and rollback procedures
• Validation & Cutover: Post-migration functional, performance, and data-integrity testing, followed by DNS cutover and environment cleanup
• Knowledge Transfer: Handover sessions enabling Igloo Studio's team to operate the new AWS environment independently

Partner Support Services: Pre & Post Migration

DG Global Technology supported Igloo Studio across the full engagement lifecycle — from pre-migration discovery and planning, through migration execution, to ongoing AWS-based managed services delivered under agreement for a minimum of 6 months post-migration.

Pre-Migration Support Services

• Discovery Workshops & Inventory Validation: Detailed working sessions with Igloo Studio's technical stakeholders to inventory, classify, and validate all workloads with the AWS Solutions Architecture team
• Migration Readiness & Wave Planning: Dependency mapping, wave sequencing, defined change windows, Go/No-Go criteria, and documented rollback procedures
• Landing Zone & Security Baseline Design: Multi-account architecture design, network segmentation, IAM governance model, and security controls mapping
• Cost Modeling & Validation: AWS Pricing Calculator estimates validated with the AWS team, including Savings Plans strategy and cost allocation tagging design
• Inventory & Classification: Produced the validated inventory and workload classification matrix across all four GCP environments, validated by the AWS SA team

Support During Migration

• Wave Execution & Cutover Coordination: Hands-on migration execution within defined change windows, with rehearsed cutover runbooks and rollback paths on standby
• Data Migration & Integrity Validation: Database and object storage migration with row-level data validation and reconciliation before each cutover
• Performance Benchmarking & UAT: Validated workload performance against the pre-migration baseline and coordinated user acceptance testing with Igloo Studio's team
• Migration Tooling: AWS Migration Hub, AWS MGN for rehosting to EC2, and AWS DMS for Cloud SQL to Aurora MySQL migration with minimal disruption
• Knowledge Transfer: Runbook development, operational documentation, and AWS onboarding sessions for Igloo Studio's engineering and operations teams

Post-Migration Managed Services (Ongoing — 6+ Months Under Agreement)

Since the August 2025 production cutover, DG Global Technology has delivered AWS-based managed services to Igloo Studio under a managed services agreement, including:

• 24/7 Monitoring & Incident Response: Round-the-clock CloudWatch-based monitoring, alerting, and incident management with defined SLAs
• Security Management: Continuous security posture management, patching, vulnerability remediation, and security event triage
• Cost Optimization & Governance: Monthly cost reviews, Savings Plans coverage management, right-sizing recommendations, and per-account cost reporting
• Backup & Disaster Recovery: Backup lifecycle management, recovery testing, and Multi-AZ failover validation
• Continuous Improvement: Quarterly AWS Well-Architected reviews and proactive optimization aligned with Igloo Studio's product roadmap

Results and Benefits

Quantifiable Results

• Elastic Scalability: Auto-scaling EC2 and EKS replaced manual VM scaling, absorbing traffic surges during game launches and promotions without service interruption risk
• Automated Deployments: Terraform IaC and centralized CI/CD pipelines eliminated manual deployments and configuration drift across all four environments
• Resilient Data Layer: Aurora MySQL with automated failover and replication replaced manually configured Cloud SQL HA setups
• End-to-End Observability: Amazon CloudWatch delivered centralized monitoring, custom alerting, and operational intelligence across every environment
• Granular Cost Control: AWS Cost Explorer, cost allocation tags, and Savings Plans enabled per-team, per-application spend tracking and budget enforcement

Business Impact

• Faster Release Cycles: Automation and DevOps best practices shortened release cycles and reduced operational risk — directly improving player satisfaction and retention
• Regional Expansion Ready: AWS's Availability Zones and edge locations improve game performance and reduce latency for players in emerging Southeast Asian markets
• Compliance Readiness: Centralized security tooling and audit logging position Igloo Studio to confidently enter new regulated markets
• Engineering Focus: Managed services like Aurora and EKS freed engineering resources from infrastructure maintenance toward creative, business-driven initiatives

About DG Global Technology

DG Global Technology is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and Managed Service Partner specializing in enterprise cloud transformation across ASEAN markets. With 50+ AWS certifications and 5+ years of partnership experience, we deliver comprehensive managed services including 24/7 monitoring, proactive optimization, security management, and cost governance.