NinetwoLabs is a game development company founded with the motto "Let's make a great game, let's create a new trend." The flagship title, "Drawshop Kingdom," is a strategy and management simulation game featuring standout 2D-pixel graphics. It was released on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in August 2021. Due to its casual game IP elements and engaging gameplay, it has garnered significant success, such as being selected as Google Play's new recommended game of the week.
NinetwoLabs is currently working on a global metaverse and tycoon game based on this original IP for web and mobile platforms in collaboration with a partner. They are currently operating a global gaming community with over 40,000 active participants. Since its establishment at the end of 2020, NinetwoLabs has been experiencing rapid growth, with a 3-4x increase in employment and revenue each year, as well as securing large-scale investments.
All game services of Ninetwo Labs are operated as 'cloud native'. From game servers to game operation and action-related engines, partner systems, and all elements such as content enjoyed by users or items purchased within the game are all hosted in the cloud. We utilize AWS cloud as the main infrastructure and have established a multi-cloud environment for stabilization and backup operations.
In the initial stages of the business, there were not many games or service contents operating on the cloud. However, due to the continuous addition of game content and feature updates, and the launch of global metaverse games, the scale of cloud infrastructure has rapidly increased. Cloud usage has also surged, to the extent that costs now over ten times higher than in the early stages of the business are being charged. Given the ever-increasing scale of infrastructure usage and cloud consumption, we have been contemplating ways to view and manage the used cloud resources at once, and whether there are more effective management methods for the cloud infrastructure.
“We highly recommend actively utilizing tools like OpsNow that can analyze cloud usage status. Especially for small development-centered companies, it might be challenging to manage overall cloud costs and resources. OpsNow provides cost reports and dashboards for cloud resources and expenses, making it easy for not only developers but also finance officers to monitor and manage cloud usage status."
NinetwoLabs Auditor, JongHoon Jung
NinetwoLabs uses AWS cloud. While operating the cloud, we realized the need for proper cloud management. We decided to implement OpsNow as it allows not only infrastructure managers and developers but anyone to easily monitor cloud resources and costs.
Shortly after implementing OpsNow, NinetwoLabs was contacted by a sales representative who informed that the costs had suddenly spiked significantly. Upon investigation, we found that this was due to incorrectly purchasing the AWS reserved instances, which resulted in massive charges. Fortunately, with the help of the sales representative, we were able to quickly address the issue without any major problems. If we hadn't been using OpsNow, we might not have realized this until the charges were billed, leading to even higher costs and making timely resolution more difficult. This experience reinforced the importance of cloud cost management, and now we regularly check and manage costs using OpsNow.
Through the 'resource optimization' feature, we deleted unused resources and adjusted them to match the actual usage. It is very useful because it automatically analyzes cloud usage and provides guidance on optimization without having to manually check numerous cloud resources. We are also actively using the 'reserved discount recommendation by CSP' feature, which analyzes cloud usage patterns and recommends the most suitable plans. A significant advantage is that AI calculates the cost-saving effect when purchasing reserved instances, allowing us to compare and contrast in advance. As a result, Ninetwo Labs has reduced its cloud costs by over 40% compared to when it solely used AWS, after adopting OpsNow.
Before adopting OpsNow, we had our costs automatically charged as the payments were set to auto-pay. It was inconvenient to check details beyond the total costs using the CSP's console, as we had to navigate through each menu to view specific details. This made it difficult for the infrastructure manager to check the details each time. However, with OpsNow, we can easily view detailed breakdowns through the dashboard. Now, all relevant parties including developers, infrastructure managers, and finance officers regularly check and manage cloud costs using OpsNow. The feature we are most satisfied with is 'cost analysis'. Based on the billed costs, it allows us to view detailed information about the products or instances that incurred the costs and check whether each resource is being used well and its usage amount. The ability to visualize cost status through various graphs makes data analysis easy without having to transfer it to Excel. We are currently developing several games and expect cloud usage to increase further as we approach their launch. Ninetwo Labs plans to continue managing cloud costs and resources more efficiently using OpsNow.
