Redis to the Rescue?

Based in Berlin, wooga is the leading European social games
developer. Social games offer interesting scaling challenges — when they become popular, the user base can grow quickly, often by 50.000 people per day or more.

This case study recounts how we successfully scaled up two
Facebook games to one million daily active users each, why we decided to replace MySQL (once partially, once fully) with Redis, what difficulties we encountered on the way and how we solved them.

As an in-memory database, Redis offers an order-of-magnitude
reduction in query roundtrip latency, but also introduces new challenges: How can you guarantee durability of data in the case of server outages? How do you best structure your data when there are no ad-hoc query capabilities?

This talk will go into technical details of our backend
architecture and discuss both its advantages and disadvantages, how it stacks up against other possible setups, and what lessons we have learned.