MoonLab is uniquely placed to tap into the potential of the rapidly growing space that is the intersection of the global gaming and blockchain industry. With a team comprising experienced blockchain developers, game developers, web developers, business analysts and testers, the company serves a diverse clientele in the region and beyond.

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With the global video games market poised to achieve a growth rate of 9.1% (CAGR) between 2022 and 2028, the online gaming industry has been buzzing. Topebox nailed the winning formula early on in the gaming world, with successes like Pocket Army, Sky Dancer: Free Falling, King Rival, Titan Hunters, Guns And Dungeons. But My DeFi Pet, which used blockchain technology, presented a challenge unlike before. The non-fungible token (NFT) game exploded in popularity globally, with its daily active users increasing five times within weeks of its launch.

Challenge: Balancing game popularity & performance

Ensuring a top-notch user experience and game performance has always been a priority at Topebox. As the company scaled its user base and employee headcount, they needed to better prepare for the next generation of gamers, who looked for more connections, greater identity freedom as well as increased control over their data and assets.

With users joining from countries as far apart as Brazil and the Philippines, an on-premise server could no longer deliver optimal performance for this volume of geographically distributed traffic.

Solution: The key is in the cloud, Google Cloud!

Topebox’s performance and growth requirements were best served by moving to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Cloud Kinetics’ support. And Topebox was delighted by how quick and seamless it was – the company experienced nearly no downtime during the migration to GCP and the entire exercise took just a few hours!

Outcomes: Transforming the user experience with GCP

The wins of moving to the cloud were evident in more ways than one.

1. Data insights to drive cost optimization & performance

GCP also offered a data warehouse, which Topebox was able to leverage with Cloud Kinetics’ help, gaining detailed player insights and analytics as a service.

“Cloud Kinetics brought a ton of experience and a team that knew which services were required and when,” the Topebox team added. “We realized huge benefits from the relationship. The game’s performance jumped by 80 percent. The remaining 20 percent benefit was cost optimization and beefing up backend ops. We couldn’t have done this ourselves.”

2. Low latency & smooth peak usage performance

• At peak usage, Topebox has clocked 100k DAU and 20k CCU, and runs smoothly at these levels without any trouble.
• The game loading time was reduced from 3 minutes to 15 seconds thanks to Cloud CDN.
• The server response is in low latency (3-5ms).

3. Scalability & reliability

The ability to scale and the reliability in seconds help reduce costs for maintenance. These ensure that the gaming company doesn’t miss any opportunities in the market, as it is able to quickly pivot, scale, and adapt. Using Cloud CDN, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Loadbalancing helped deploy new game versions globally in seconds with no downtime during upgrades. The backend uses GKE, ComputeEngine, with easy scale up/down ability, while the database uses Cloud Firestore, which also scales globally and has strong user-based security.

Moving to Google Cloud helped us deliver the best experience for our users. The speed of game loading and the smoothness of user interaction in-game are all incredible now. Cloud Kinetics was able to help reduce cost, support investigating incidents, and assist with choosing the appropriate technologies and implementations to ensure a seamless experience. Nam Nguyen, CTO, Topebox

The future: Partnering for growth

Topebox sees Google Cloud, with its open cloud solution and ease of use, playing a very important role in their infrastructure. And with the market growing only bigger, the gaming company recognizes the importance of having the right partner to deploy these solutions.

“We’re exploring many other services of the GCP Ecosystem, and we think those will help us with the big titles we have planned in the near future as we scale up globally. We are considering Cloud Spanner and the ML for our AI and Bot in-game,” Nam Nguyen says. Cloud Kinetics sees this partnership growing only stronger as they support Topebox in uncovering new opportunities and building a new generation of online games.

The post How Topebox Won The Blockchain Game With Google Cloud appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

The creators of RoboWorld aim to capture the imaginations of billions of players as they bring their games to the global market. With exciting gameplay, a new reality experience with cutting-edge AR technology, ownership of in-game items via NFTs, and a recommendation system-based Marketplace, the agile startup is on the cusp of something big.

Challenge: Managing growth and scale with a cost-effective solution

The RoboWorld team was looking to offer an unparalleled gaming experience to global gamers. The augmented reality-backed immersive gameplay had to be seamless and scalable. In preparation for rapid growth and agility, the team also needed a cost-effective cloud solution that was easy to set up and easy to monitor.

“Our vision for the future of blockchain gaming is to create a reality-based, decentralized assets strategy card game that delivers an unparalleled gaming experience. With the help of augmented reality and a global player base, we aim to build a unique universe where players can battle opponents and interact with audiences, creating a dynamic advertising platform that can promote brands and distribute news in a real environment surrounding the game,” says Louis Le, CTO, RoboWorld

Solution: Unlocking a world of options with GKE to build agility & responsiveness

In consultation with the Cloud Kinetics’ team of cloud experts, the team evaluated options. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) emerged as the frontrunner with its flexible pricing model and competitive offering. The sustained-use and committed-use discounts that GCP offered would help them see reduced costs over time, a compelling choice for an early-stage startup, according to the game’s creators.

What’s more, the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) allowed for a seamless move from on-premise to the cloud and was also easy to set up. GKE also promised to reduce the requirement for ongoing manual maintenance of the master cluster and scaling of nodes. All in all, this would make for a more efficient and convenient user experience and help them deliver on their vision.

We partnered with Cloud Kinetics to help us onboard and optimize our usage of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). With Cloud Kinetics’ expertise, we were able to navigate the complex GCP environment and quickly get up to speed with the latest best practices. Louis Le, CTO, RoboWorld

Outcome: Accelerated time to market and boost to player engagement

With a global audience for the game, the team anticipated the need for efficiently handling spikes and troughs in usage. Using GKE helped enable:

• Stability and reliability
• High availability across multiple zones
• Ability to handle troughs and spikes in player usage
• Auto-scaling when needed
• Tools for easy monitoring

Cloud Kinetics has been working closely with the RoboWorld team to tap the full benefits of Google Cloud, as they revolutionize the gaming industry and build a shared experience that blurs the lines between reality and gaming.

On the experience so far, the CTO of team RoboWorld says, “We partnered with Cloud Kinetics to help us onboard and optimize our usage of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) through a grant program. With Cloud Kinetics’ expertise, we were able to navigate the complex GCP environment and quickly get up to speed with the latest best practices.”

“The Cloud Kinetics team helped us develop a customized solution that met our specific needs and ensured we were able to take full advantage of the GCP grant. Their guidance and support throughout the process were invaluable, allowing us to optimize our usage of GCP and accelerate our time to market. Overall, Cloud Kinetics was an instrumental partner in our successful GCP implementation and optimization.” Louis Le added.

Partnering for future growth and next-gen gaming

Google Cloud’s suite of products and services like Cloud Spanner will play a key role in helping the company scale up and optimize its gaming platform. For instance, Cloud Spanner’s scalable, fully managed relational database service, will help keep the game running seamlessly and smoothly as the player base expands and newer features get added to the gaming experience. The team also plans to leverage Google Cloud’s AI and machine learning capabilities to bring an unprecedented degree of personalization for players, increasing engagement and enhancing the RoboWorld game experience.

They are also keen to explore Google Cloud’s Internet of Things (IoT) services to help capture and analyze data from connected devices.

A spate of exciting events is planned in the lead-up to the official launch of RoboWorld. This includes a Pre-Alpha test for their communities, a Public boxes sale with support from ImmutableX in March, and the official game launch later in the year. The right cloud environment and cloud operations support will help strengthen the company as they gear up for these.

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Given that inertia in the industry, is there any innovation to look forward to? Yes. One of the region’s leading airlines embarked on a unique, blockchain-based project to revamp its frequent flier system as a pilot before rolling it out to other business units (BUs).

Blockchain, based on the distributed ledger technology, allows organizations to streamline shared work streams – such as supply chains, logistics, and multi-modal warehouse management – by exchanging and tracking assets and transactions on a shared ledger. Blockchain is a transparent and verifiable system. As a shared, secure ledger of transactions distributed among a network of computers, blockchain limits waste, reduces the risk of fraud and enables the creation of new revenue streams.

Tech & Talent

“We wanted to try out this new tech, initially with our frequent flier program, which has a few hundred thousand customers across multiple tiers,” the airline’s CTO said. “Since we were on the Microsoft platform, we wanted to work with a partner with proven expertise on Azure and blockchain technology. We went through the trough of vendors and zeroed in on  Cloud Kinetics (CK).”

In enterprise use, blockchain networks are often distributed among a group of partners (called a consortium), giving each partner real-time visibility into every transaction. Each partner also can reject incorrect transactions before they’re applied to the ledger, which simplifies auditing and dramatically reduces the risk of fraud.

The CK team went through the requirements and complexities. “We proposed a scalable blockchain model based on the utilization and consumption of resources,” Karthik Santhanam, CK’s co-founder, said. “We have been working with this airline since 2018. We knew how their BUs worked and the level of precision they wanted in the solution.”

CK chose ACL (Azure Confidential Ledger), a distributed ledger but one where the business logic is not centrally controlled. ACL uses Azure confidential computing capabilities, running on hardware-backed secure enclaves. It provides tamperproof data storage in scenarios where critical metadata records must not be modified, including in perpetuity for regulatory compliance and archival purposes.

“We found the Ethereum-based blockchain on Azure as the ideal platform for this,” Santhanam said. “We proposed a custom development keeping the airline’s objectives in mind. We worked initially with Microsoft to build the development and quality assurance environment, then with the airline to move the system into production and offer our suite of managed services.”

Innovation & Outcome

The outcome? “The solution worked like a charm,” the airline CTO said. “It was well integrated with production. We could scale it with multiple BUs in due course. We were glad that CK provided systems operations and support as well. Moreover, CK had to align with our IT governance and service delivery model for seamless integration.”

The result? “ The project led CK to win Microsoft’s Innovative Partner of the Year award,” Santhanam said. “The airline had other partners for other projects. But for this project based on Azure blockchain, CK was the only vendor. We also provided support for development, systems operations, and maintenance.”

New tech may help airlines bounce back from the pandemic once the recovery phase kicks in. “While curbs are easing, a full return to normal operations is a long way off,” Reuters reported on Oct 13, 2021. “IATA estimates global aviation industry losses from the pandemic will be a towering US$200 billion for 2020-2022. Losses in Asia alone were close to US$50 billion in 2020. International travel in the Asia-Pacific region was at around 4% of 2019 levels in August 2021.”

As a footnote, Azure Blockchain Service was retired on Sept 10, 2021. “Customers are recommended to use ConsenSys’ QBS (Quorum Blockchain Service) as a direct replacement, which offers expanded features and flexible deployment options for managed blockchain networks,” Microsoft reported. “QBS is a managed service built on technology acquired from JP Morgan Chase. It automates the deployment and management of a cloud-based blockchain network. It is a fully managed ledger service that gives enterprises the ability to operate blockchain networks at scale.”

The post How An Airlines Flew High With Blockchain On Azure appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

From the wild early days of Bitcoin being the platform of choice for cryptocurrencies, to an overarching vision to move away from centralised banking systems, Blockchain has come a long way. In the process, it has transitioned into a viable technology for secure, fast and trustworthy multi-party transactional systems. What has been the key driver powering this growth ? The answer lies at the core of its technology solution.

Blockchain Values for Enterprise Solutions

The assurances that Blockchain as a technology offers can be enlisted as below:

Trust Decentralisation

As a ledger of records that can be shared across distributed nodes that participate in the transaction, Blockchain moves away from the single point of trust that is needed in the traditional transactional models. This makes Blockchain extremely trustworthy as the integrity of data doesn’t rest with a centralised entity alone. It is a shared trust.

Security

Ideally with distribution of data, the risk of data being tampered becomes elevated in traditional approaches as data is spread. However, with blockchain and the record of ledgers shared across transacting parties and with cryptographic encryption, the chances of security breaches become next to impossible. And furthermore, Blockchains are append-only systems where only addition of new records is allowed. Hence the ledgers are immutable.

Transparency

The entire data is attributed to all members in a decentralised setup. The addition of records involves a complete consensus amongst participating nodes. Such a democratic and transparent setup sets apart block chain as the best suited solution involving multiple business entities.

The Cloud Advantage for Block Chain

Though the promise of Blockchain has been undeniable from the early days, the trouble has always been with respect to realising its potential and converting the promising technology into packaged solution that can be hassle free to build, deploy and maintain. This is exactly where the well established robustness and scalability of Public cloud platforms bring in a huge advantage.

Computational power

The key challenge in a blockchain implementation is the need for computational resources. The biggest advantage of a blockchain solution hosted on cloud setup is by leveraging the power of elasticity and high performance provided by Cloud Infra solution. Blockchain nodes can be setup as Scale sets that can be automated to proliferate based on performance needs and this tackles the massive computing power needs.

Ease of Build, Proof-of-Concept solutions, Rapid Scaling and Management

Public cloud platforms offer templatised deployments in partnership with ledger technologies that reduce the deployment complexities to a matter of clicks.

In case of Blockchain-as-a-Service solution, the cloud provider also manages and maintains underlying Ledger technologies, thus eliminating need for maintenance and upgrades in a fast evolving technology.

Cost Advantage

With their per unit and Scale-on-need pricing, Cloud platforms eliminate the need for upfront capital investments on performance intensive Block chain topologies. It also eliminates the need for infra planning with future roadmaps in mind, which is critical in a rapidly evolving Block chain ecosystem.

A Business case

Let us see an interesting business case of how Cloud Kinetics helped a company deploy its blockchain application on cloud and how Blockchain technology can be empowered by an underlying Cloud platform.

An Airline provider wanted to have a Digital Wallet application that would help customers convert their air miles to digital currency. And it adds to this an innovative idea to enable customer purchases using that digital currency to multiple vendors across airports.

Now, the traditional approach to such a business case would involve building centralised databases for capturing miles and enabling digital payment modes and integration with multiple intermediaries to transact with multiple vendors. Inspite of the complex integration there would always remain trust and security issues amongst the multi-vendor ecosystem.

This is exactly where Blockchain as a technology provides a perfect mix of decentralised and trustable transaction solution involving multiple business entities. The decentralised nature of Block chain removes payment intermediaries by multiple third parties and brings the transacting parties under a single umbrella of trust. Being decentralised, the redemption is updated faster and real-time for partners and customers alike. By nature of blockchain transactions being permanent and irrevocable, customer details as well as transactions cannot be tampered with. Hence the block chain powered application would be faster, trustworthy, scalable and secure.

Blockchain on Cloud – The Road Ahead

Cloud-based Block chain implementations can be both private implementations as in within enterprises as well as consortium implementations involving multiple external parties. They can also be centralised ledger systems with multiple parties transacting via a single centralised ledger or distributed ledgers with independent transacting entities.

In all cases, with scale being the big factor for feasibility in the future, Cloud based Block chain deployments can provide significant cutting edge and cost advantages for solutions. Block chain deployments as service would eliminate the last mile management overheads and allow enterprises to accelerate and focus purely on application deployments.

Gartner predicts that $3 Trillion worth of Goods and Services transactions will be Blockchain-based by 2025. The maturity of Block chain Services on Cloud will indeed be the driving factor towards this tremendous growth and creaing new vistas in trust-driven applications of the future.

The post Cloud-Powered Blockchain Technology: Decoding The Disruption appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

These eight essential digital transformation technologies are have been identified by PwC as game changers and are believed to be revolutionizing the way companies do business:

Digital transformation technologies for the modern world: The selection conundrum

PwC analysed over 250 emerging technologies to find the “Essential Eight” Digital technologies. According to the study, the 5 most frequently used of the Essential Eight technologies in EMEA by private businesses are IoT technologies (55%), robotics (32%), 3D printing (25%) and AI (27%).

67% of private business leaders surveyed by PwC in EMEA see digitalization as highly relevant to their businesses’ long-term viability and are increasingly employing these eight technologies in their businesses. However, most C-level executives are having a hard time deciding which technologies are most pertinent to business sustainability and growth. Choosing from right Digital Transformation technologies where every technology seems most relevant and accurate poses a dilemma for the CIOs. To help companies focus their digital transformation efforts, these eight emerging technologies can be considered by companies as the building blocks.

While each company’s selection might vary according to their requirements and strategy, these technologies are expected to have a deep impact on most businesses, globally.

1. Artificial Intelligence

AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines. It automates complex decision-making tasks to mimic the human thought processes. Encompassing Machine Learning (ML), AI algorithms can learn, understand, analyse and act on new data based on rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions.

2. Augmented Reality

AR is a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing a composite view. When done properly, the user experience is seamless, opening a new realm for businesses across the board to explore. It has already been successfully implemented in Airline, Manufacturing and entertainment industries.

3. Blockchain

Essentially, Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and unalterable way. Originally devised for the digital currency, Bitcoin, the business community has found other potential uses for the technology. Insurance, Supply Chain, Energy and Ad-technology are a few industries where Blockchain applications are already being used.

4. Drones

Drones are UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and are used in situations where manned flight is considered risky, difficult or expensive. Types of drones can vary significantly based on their design and application. Surveillance, Survey, Sport, Cinematography and Delivery are some examples where usage of drones is becoming common.

5. Internet of Things

IoT works on the premise that everything that can be connected will be connected to the internet. It is a system of interrelated computing devices, machines, objects or vehicles able to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. Logistics, Appliances, Packaging, Security industries are making headway in Industrial automation and the possibilities for IoT are endless.

6. Robotics

Machines with improved sensing, control and intelligence used to automate, augment, or assist human activities are growing in a broad range of services applications. These technologies help develop machines that be substitute for human beings or to replicate human actions. This is widely used to reduce human resource costs and increase efficiency.

7. Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. A person using virtual reality equipment is able to look around the artificial world, move around in it, and interact with virtual features or items. Gaming, entertainment, education and defense are some industries that are benefiting from VR.

8. 3-D Printing

3-D Printing process builds a three-dimensional object from a computer-aided design (CAD) model, usually by successively adding material layer by layer, which is why it is also called additive manufacturing. It is being used in manufacturing, medical, industry and socio-cultural sectors to become successful commercial technology. More recently, 3-D printing has also been used in the humanitarian and development sector to produce a range of medical items, prosthetic and spare parts.

The time is now!

Although some of these Digital Transformation Technologies may seem futuristic, the reality is that they are real and available, and being used right now by more agile competitors to transform their businesses. The time for starting your digital transformation journey is now.

How Cloud Kinetics can help power your digital transformation

Cloud Kinetics serves as a technology partner to enterprises across industries, with a focus on enabling them to create and sustain value through the transformative power of advanced technologies. We have been fortunate to work with some of the best companies from all over the world and provide turnkey solutions to complex business challenges. View our Case Studies and see how we are utilizing these emerging technologies to create real value for businesses.

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