“Right from the start, we wanted to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build our global infrastructure,” Peltola says. “We had used AWS with some projects early on and we knew it could meet our needs, particularly when it comes to our growing international customer base. We wanted to build a rich set of online services for our games, and using AWS as our platform was the natural choice,” Peltola says. “Practically all Rovio games use services running on AWS. For example, both the original Angry Birds and The Croods—based on the hit DreamWorks movie—rely heavily on services running on the AWS Cloud.”

Rovio is using several AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) in the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment, as well as Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) for analytics processing. The company also uses

Rovio runs a very automated and distributed architecture, which makes it easy for the company to scale up and down. “It’s designed to be distributed, scalable, and fail-proof,” Peltola says. “We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure we have a very clean platform architecture to support applications that are lightweight, reliable, and scalable.”

Automation, whether it is for orchestration or deployment, is a crucial component of the platform. Good APIs are the key to building a dynamic environment.