Case Study: Game developer MediaMolecule achieves massive scalability—serving millions of user-created levels and handling peak 80,000 concurrent users—with Amazon Web Services

MediaMolecule - Customer Case Study

MediaMolecule, a U.K. game studio now part of Sony Worldwide Studios and creator of LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet 2, needed an infrastructure that could support huge day‑one demand and rapid development cycles for user‑generated content on PlayStation 3. With limited upfront budget and a need for flexible test, beta and QA environments, the team required a solution that could handle millions of users and tens of thousands of requests per second from launch.

They rebuilt their servers on Amazon Web Services, migrating data and running a stack using EC2, EBS, S3, CloudFront, SQS and related components (custom C++ data store on m2.2xlarge instances, C++/Ruby front ends behind HAProxy/nginx with Varnish caching). The AWS setup now runs ~50 instances serving over 6 million user-created levels (peak ~80,000 concurrent users and ~30,000 HTTP requests/sec), stores multiple terabytes in S3 and handles about 1 TB of traffic per day, delivering the needed scalability, flexibility and cost efficiency.

MediaMolecule

Alex Evans

CTO