A cloud-based infrastructure was essential for the worldwide release of Super Mario Run. When choosing the right infrastructure, two important factors were considered: whether it could guarantee sufficient resources to cope with the enormous traffic volumes at the time of release, and whether it could operate in compliance with each country's laws and regulations. Nintendo and DeNA chose AWS as the game server infrastructure that could meet these requirements. “We were already aware of AWS's operational achievements, so we saw it as the service that could guarantee the enormous resources we needed for our current project. We knew the flexibility and extensibility of the AWS infrastructure would allow us to use it without any concerns,” says Takemoto.

Games involve great fluctuations in data loads, requiring large-scale resources if running on premises. "We thought that if we used the cloud we would have the flexibility to handle loads even at peak times, which would also be beneficial for optimizing costs,” says Kaneko.

Because Super Mario Run was expected to have a temporary large spike in server load immediately after launch, the company evaluated whether it should migrate to the cloud from the start. “With Super Mario Run, it would have been very expensive to try to handle that volume using on-premises resources.”

Also, purchasing a large-scale on-premises server would have necessitated operational resources as well as a power supply and cooling system at the installation site. Furthermore, overseas expansion would mean the server had to be at an overseas site as well, increasing operational workload. "AWS is greatly beneficial for the global game industry, not only in terms of latency, scalability, and cost, but also in its ability to significantly reduce operational workload and resource needs,” says Fukawa.

Another reason Nintendo chose AWS was the possiblity of migrating DeNA's architecture, which has a great on-premises track record, directly to the cloud. DeNA has extensive experience in building large-scale infrastructures for smart-device services in on-premises environments. It has also built on-premises management systems for stable and efficient operation of these infrastructures. "When it comes to service infrastructure for smart devices, DeNA has the know-how to create a high-availability system that can be scaled easily," says Kaneko. "This time, we had to set up our infrastructure in a very short time, and we thought about running it directly in the cloud. AWS didn't present any obstacles to accomplishing this."

AWS has internationally recognized security certifications, so the company was confident about using the service. "We were wondering what kind of configuration would fully guarantee security. With AWS, we could see the design. This was also one of the principal reasons for choosing AWS,” says Kaneko.