“Handing off the operational responsibility for Kafka to someone was, to King, comparable to leaving your kid at kindergarten for the first time. You really need to trust that other party to take good care of your baby.”
Marcus Walter
Technical Director, King
Confluent Cloud Helps King Focus on Scalability and Innovation
King is a global leader in interactive mobile entertainment, best known for their world known mobile game Candy Crush Saga®. King games are enjoyed by more than 200 million players every month. As a data-driven company, King adopted data streaming early, leveraging Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® to support their business needs. However, as their data needs grew, self-managing Kafka became increasingly complex and costly.
To continue scaling efficiently, King sought a partner who could manage Kafka at the necessary scale with minimal disruption to their highly-tuned proprietary systems. The solution was Confluent Cloud, a fully managed data streaming platform that allowed King to shift its focus from operations to innovation.
From Complexity to Confidence: King Relies on Confluent for Seamless Infrastructure
High availability and stability were key considerations for King’s choice of Confluent. As Marcus Walter, Technical Director at King, noted, knowing that Confluent could manage Kafka "better than we could" gave them the confidence to hand over the reins. For King, a close partnership with a vendor was crucial, especially when dealing with the complexities of a large-scale gaming infrastructure where uptime, rapid response, and the ability to collaborate are critical to success.
Initially, King operated a parallel data streaming pipeline alongside their batch processing system, using Kafka as transport. While much of their KPI and reporting was still batch-based, the high costs of data processing led King to gradually shift some of their compute intensive reporting and business monitoring to Apache Flink. Leveraging the capabilities of stream processing, King now aggregates data in real time, which they describe as "a very powerful concept."
Scaling Insights for a Billion-Event Ecosystem
Handling very large volumes of data, King manages a constantly evolving data ecosystem. Scalability is crucial, as the ability to gather insights about players and their behaviors drives product development and competitive advantage.
While King has been operating with two parallel pipelines—batch and streaming—the ambition has for a long time been to move to a streaming only setup. One of the blockers for making this happen has been to be able to handle the operational load that comes with maintaining Kafka at scale. Now, with the help of Confluent, the operational load has been reduced to a minimum and thanks to that the team feels confident to switch to a streaming-only solution.
Throughout their transition to the cloud King made several attempts to migrate their Kafka infrastructure, trying out different vendors and solutions. Ultimately thanks to an open and constructive dialogue, King gained confidence that Confluent was the right partner and fully migrated to its managed service. Now, King can provision new environments without the need for additional hardware, and the operational burden of managing data streaming is entirely offloaded. With Confluent, King is on track to decommission its legacy data pipeline completely.
“Shutting down our old business reporting pipeline is something we’d talked about for a long time but never felt ready for. Now, with Confluent, we have the confidence to do it. It’s a true game changer.” — Marcus Walter, Technical Director, King
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