Recently, Mintegral not only announced that they would make their SDK open source but also shared an inside look into how they serve and show ads. And in a move to increase transparency in the industry, they’re now encouraging other companies in the mobile space to do the same. At GameAnalytics, we’re no stranger to open source. Our C++, C#, and JavaScript SDKs are all open source. Our entire library of SDKs is built on our public data collection API, which is fully transparent and documented (you can review it here). At the same time, proper data collection is a key part of having useful analytics. So developers can see what events are collected by GameAnalytics in two ways: Our SDK’s provide full debugging options of what is sent to our servers. You can set this flag at integration time...

Here at GameAnalytics, we receive, store and process game events from 1.2 billion monthly players in nearly 90,000 games. These events all pass through a system we call the data collection API, which forwards the events to other internal systems so that we eventually end up with statistics and graphs on a dashboard, displaying user activity, game revenue, and more. The data collection API is fairly simple in principle: games send events to us as JSON objects through HTTP POST requests, and we send a short response and take the event from there. Clients either use one of our SDKs or invoke our REST API directly. We get approximately five billion requests per day, each typically containing two or three events for a total of a few kilobytes. The response is a simple HTTP 200 “OK” response with a small...

The data collection API is one of the most critical and highly loaded services in GameAnalytics’ backend infrastructure, responsible for receiving and storing raw game events from 850+ million unique monthly players in 70,000 games currently. An outage of the service at that scale would lead to irreversible data loss and thousands of sad customers. In this blog post, we will discuss how we improved our infrastructure deployment practices by utilising the “Blue-Green deployment approach” powered by Terraform – a recipe that helps us achieve 100% uptime for our Data Collectors while continuously delivering new releases. Data Collectors Collectors are responsible for receiving high volumes of raw game events from players around the globe and storing them for subsequent processing by our analytics systems. It’s a REST service that, on busy days, handles up to 4.5 million HTTP requests per...

By now, many of you will be aware of the fact that GameAnalytics is about to undergo a major technical overhaul. For the past 18 months, myself and a small team of engineers have been rebuilding (and also migrating), our existing infrastructure to an innovative new solution. That solution is called Druid, and it’s essentially a high performance data store. In this post, my aim is to give more of a technical overview of the new systems and solutions that we’re putting in place. I hope this helps to give all users of our service more context about the change, why it was necessary, and the benefits it will bring. For more information about the upcoming changes, you can check out this Beta announcement post. What is Druid? Druid is an open source data store designed for real-time exploratory analytics...