Driving into the cloud
ADVANTAGEOUS: SOFTWARE GETS UPDATED EVEN AS IT IS BEING USED
The services underlying many popular online services would not be possible without a simple license.
CArthur Goldstuck omputer gaming is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, but it would still be stuck in the slow lane were it not for another booming industry, namely cloud computing.
One of the world’s great case studies of the partnership between the two industries involves a company that is partly South Africa-owned: Tencent Games.
It is a subsidiary of Chinese social and gaming giant Tencent, one of the world’s 10 most valuable companies – and one-third owned by South Africa’s Naspers.
Its gaming subsidiary is, in its own right, quickly becoming the most valuable gaming company in the world. Among other, it owns League of Legends, the most popular PC game on the planet, reported to have generated $1.4 billion (about R23 billion) in revenue last year.
It owns 40% of Epic Games, creators of gaming phenomenon Fortnite, the most profitable game of all, having made $2.4 billion in 2019.
Underpinning those massive revenues is every download, every play, by the gamers of the world. Every time we download and play a game, we are potentially adding to that revenue. And underpinning our gameplay is the cloud.
Tencent Games delivers its games – and enables online gameplay – via a service called Cloud Game Solution for PC games.
It allows for seamless, “play-asyou-go” updates to gamers, often updating their games without them even realising it.
This “magic” is achieved through microservices, a software architecture that allows applications to be divided up into small chunks that can be updated almost instantly, giving the user the sense of seamless updates.
In the case of Tencent Games, the microservices are built on Microsoft Service Fabric, a framework to package, deploy, and manage microservices at any scale.
As more of our activities move to the cloud, this will become the norm, and the idea of manually installing new versions of software will seem positively antique.
It is astonishing, then, to discover that many organisations are still sticking doggedly to the old ways of doing things.
That approach isn’t confined to old models of software use, but even the use of outdated software.
The main reason? They don't want to pay a licence fee for new versions.
The most jarring example is companies who have not updated the operating system running their servers, computers that “serve” the organisation’s processes, applications and business operations.
The most widely used in the world, Microsoft Server, comes in versions covering the gamut of company sizes, from a small business option called Essentials, aimed at companies with up to 25 users, all the way to a Data Centre version used in the cloud.
The software uses the latest technology, increases data storage, improves operations, and ensures business continuity – a key advantage when many companies had to switch to remote working in 2020.
Yet, numerous organisations still use an outdated version, Windows Server 2008.
Microsoft pulled the life support plug on this version in January 2020 – meaning that it stopped offering security patches and updates, since the operating system had reached “end of life”.
Anyone still using the OS after January has left their organisations vulnerable to data breaches, not to mention lawsuits for non-compliance with security standards.
Equally fatally in an era of intense competition, these companies are running their businesses on 12-year-old technology.
If the disadvantages of the old ways are not convincing, consider these benefits of the new ways, suggested by Microsoft:
Increased storage and computing abilities enable both future growth and adaptability;
Access to artificial intelligence and machine learning, built into the latest servers, helps to streamline existing processes and identify inefficiencies;
Control and manage Windows-based networks more easily and comprehensively.
Reduce the risk of security breaches by designating what can run on servers, detecting when unauthorised users or machines are trying to connect, and offering better control of who has access;
Prevent attacks and detect suspicious activity before it can harm company data or damage the business;
Most significantly, given the Covid-19 crisis, ensure maximum business continuity in case of natural disaster or failure, with site recovery in the cloud.
Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-inchief of Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on
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Companies that are still trying to understand the benefits of upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Server would do well to explore the Microsoft/Tencent Games case study.
In summary, it argues that the combination of microservices and server technology allows the company to “create, deploy, and maintain the new game applications at large scale.
“It can start small, as needed, and grow to massive scale with hundreds or thousands of machines”.
Further, “game functions are isolated into a variety of services that help reduce the complexity when building applications”.
By upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Server, companies ensure their software is kept up to date even as it is being used.
In this scenario, downtime will eventually become as archaic as manually installed software. A simple licence will be the only ticket to the game.
For more information on licence upgrades and renewals, visit