Case Study: Z2 achieves global, low-latency real-time multiplayer scale and reduced analytics costs with Amazon Web Services

Z2 - Customer Case Study

Z2 is a Seattle-based game developer that creates multiplayer, free-to-play mobile games with rich graphics and social features. With more than 55 million players and roughly 3 billion gameplay sessions, Z2 needed low-latency, globally distributed infrastructure to support real-time interactions and a way to mine large volumes of gameplay data to improve features and customer support.

Z2 runs its platform on AWS—using Amazon EC2 across eight Regions (about 120 instances), CloudFront (43 edge locations), S3, RDS, Route 53, ELB, IAM, and an analytics pipeline built on SQS and Amazon Redshift storing hundreds of terabytes. By optimizing instance types, automating DevOps, and maintaining a high ratio of Reserved Instances, Z2 achieved fast global scale for spikes in traffic, low-latency gameplay, and significantly lower analytics hosting costs while gaining timely insights to drive product improvements.

Z2

Markus Schweig

Director Live Operations