Online gaming firm Netmarble ensures agile app delivery across its environments

Netmarble gaming wanted to ensure stable connections and services for its customers with cloud-native networking solution

A global gaming company that publishes popular mobile games around the world - Netmarble

Known for developing some of the world’s most popular games such as the Seven Knights series, Lineage 2 Revolution, and Marvel, Korean online game development and publishing company Netmarble has over 10 million global users. Since its establishment in 2010, the company has expanded its operations in six regions and acquired nine other game development companies as subsidiaries. Netmarble’s business continued to flourish during the pandemic as the number of gamers increased, leading to a 52.2% year-on-year growth in the first half of 2020.

Building a cloud-native solution to ensure fast service and connectivity

For providing game services, Netmarble uses various environments across on-premises and hybrid multi-clouds. Recently, the company experienced a growing demand from internal developers for Kubernetes. It became necessary to implement cloud-native networking to their on-premises environments. When planning the Kubernetes cluster service in the on-premises, the company needed a load balancer that can be interlocked with Kubernetes in a bare-metal environment. Netmarble reviewed several open sources but found issues such as prolonged failover in case of a failure and many interruptions due to multiple connections. As a business providing online game service, the company could not afford to have these interruptions and long failovers.

It required a stable and smooth connection for millions of users at all times.

Flexible, reliable and powerful performance suitable for complex infrastructure

After multiple tests, Netmarble selected Citrix's cloud-native networking solution as it could be used in on-premises environments as well as in public clouds. “We chose the Citrix cloud-native networking solution as it was not only the only solution that have passed our tests, but also deliver high-performance application delivery across a variety of complex infrastructures.” says Yeong-Il Kim, Manager, Infra technology team of Netmarble. “Additionally, we had the confidence regarding Citrix’s stability, scalability, and flexibility as we have been using Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) for server load balancing for some time.”

Citrix understood Netmarble's requirements and quickly developed the necessary features within two months of being asked to support the company’s business operations. Netmarble achieved service automation through its cloud-native networking solution, Citrix ADC. Citrix enabled the infrastructure for Netmarble's unique hybrid multi-cloud environment, leading to benefits such as the flexible operation of infrastructure resources and a significant increase in operational productivity. The company developed and serviced an internal container service based on Citrix ADC, which is dynamically flexible, changing the size of the cluster as needed. Moreover, the solution is easy to use in multi-cluster environments.

Simplified management and increased productivity

Apart from the cloud-native service transition, Netmarble also moved its micro-services to the private cloud to reduce time to deploy and troubleshoot, and to gain visibility on a large scale. “By using Citrix ADC, we have simplified deployment and management of microservices on the architecture of our choice, allowing us to move to cloud-native at the desired speed,” says Yeong-Il Kim. “Citrix ADC is providing agile app delivery across Netmarble environments and narrowed the gap between application delivery and container-based traffic. Today, supporting large clusters and highly dynamic micro-services has become very easy for us. We are experiencing lower latency and reduced memory footprint, which is ultimately leading to a high-performance game environment, where speed is an important factor.”

By moving to Citrix solutions, Netmarble has boosted its productivity. “We have gained the ability to develop games rapidly and this helps us to meet a gamer’s requirements and needs quickly,” says Yeong-Il Kim.