Case Study: King achieves petabyte-scale analytics and ML-driven agility with Google Cloud Platform

King Playing to win with Google Cloud Platform

King, an independent unit of Activision Blizzard and maker of Candy Crush Saga, operates at massive scale—about 270 million players a month and double-digit petabytes of archived data. Facing stability problems and high operational overhead from a monolithic on-premises Hadoop environment, King needed a cloud-based platform that could handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections, unify disparate data sources, and support advanced machine-learning innovation.

King migrated to Google Cloud Platform, building a BigQuery-based data warehouse and using Cloud Storage, Dataflow, GKE, Cloud ML Engine, Pub/Sub, and Deployment Manager to ingest, store, analyze, and model data. The move unified petabyte-scale data with minimal overhead, sped analytics (cutting environment setup from days to clicks), enabled ML solutions like hundreds of virtual players to tune game difficulty, reduced infrastructure burden, improved team agility, and even helped attract talent and expand analytics as a service.

King

Åsa Bredin

FVP (First Vice President) Technology