In-depth interpretation of Tencent Cloud Blue Whale Platform: Operation and maintenance efficiency increased by 10 times, so simple

Editor's note: Games have always been one of Tencent's core businesses. Since Tencent released its first QQ game in 2003, Tencent Games has operated thousands of games. Regardless of whether it is an exclusive agent or independently developed, Tencent's client games, web games, and mobile games all use the same system for operation and maintenance management, and the efficiency is nearly ten times higher than before. This mysterious system is called the next-generation game operation and maintenance system? Blue Whale. At present, Blue Whale has been gradually opened to the outside world through Tencent Cloud, becoming Tencent Cloud's most powerful operation and maintenance tool for the gaming industry.

In Tencent’s definition, the described Blue Whale is an operation and maintenance model built on the SOA concept (Service-Oriented Architecture) and cloud technology, built with atomic service integration and tool openness. Solve the problem of unattended operation and maintenance basic services and low-cost implementation of operation and maintenance value-added services. In one sentence, Blue Whale enables game operation and maintenance to provide higher-level services at a low cost. Dang Menghui, founder of Blue Whale and head of Tencent’s game operation and maintenance support system, made a detailed analysis of the Blue Whale system and functions, and interpreted Blue Whale’s four secrets.

Tips 1: Basic operation and maintenance services? Unattended

Assume that at 4 o'clock in the morning, a certain link in the operation and maintenance system fails. According to the system's own logic, it takes 1 minute and 13 seconds. The problem is found, dealt with in seconds, and then restarted directly. When you come to work in the morning, the operation and maintenance personnel will receive a notification telling you what happened in the middle of the night, and I (Blue Whale) will help you handle it. This is the unattended function of Blue Whale.

As the name suggests, unattended means that operation and maintenance personnel do not need to do any manual operations, and the system itself handles the processing. This is the basic service for Blue Whale operation and maintenance work. If you break down the nature of the processing business, part of it is self-service release changes, zone migration, information extraction and numerical adjustment, and the other part is automated expansion and contraction, zone migration and fault handling.

Furthermore, Blue Whale can help operation and maintenance personnel package repetitive, tedious and uninnovative operation and maintenance work and make it into application tools. When encountering similar situations, the tools can be used directly to replace manual operations. , not only frees operation and maintenance personnel from various repetitive tasks, but also greatly shortens the time spent on similar operations and improves operation and maintenance efficiency. According to reports, after using Blue Whale’s zone opening app for Tencent’s “Sword and Sword 2”, a zone opening operation only takes 5-7 minutes, saving nearly 4 hours compared to before using the app, and improving efficiency dozens of times.

In the cloud era, unattended services can also realize intelligent rolling services. For example, after reaching a certain number of people, the zone opening function will be automatically implemented. For faults, the fault will be self-healed in real time. Currently, Naruto and Tiantian Xuan Dou have activated the automatic zone opening function through Blue Whale, and Super Mario has activated the fault self-healing function.

Tip 2: Operation and maintenance value-added services? The cloud era will account for 90%

At present, including basic operation tool construction, product operation decision support, user game experience optimization, and business abnormal positioning avoidance As well as value-added services such as game operation structure optimization, they already account for about 10% of the operation and maintenance work. Dang Shouhui said that value-added services in the cloud era will account for a higher proportion, and it is expected to increase to 90% in the future.

Since 2008, Tencent’s operation and maintenance system has begun to settle in the gaming field. It has gone through the script era, the operation era and the cloud era. After 2013, with the support of Tencent Cloud, it built the Blue Whale of the cloud era. system.

According to Dang Shouhui, there are no standards for game architecture and operation. The same game and the same scene may change as soon as the version changes, so operation and maintenance need to be constantly adjusted. If there are no tools Operations and maintenance must be constantly revised.

In fact, the cloudization of operation and maintenance scripts and operation and maintenance configurations can maximize configuration security. Dang Menghui mentioned that the work era serves the purpose of standardizing operations. In the traditional sense, one person manages multiple businesses and can write multiple scripts. If you change another person, you may lose all the previous person's operation and maintenance scripts.

Based on these aspects, the cloud era standardizes scripts and realizes cross-system scheduling automation. The proportion of operational value-added services like this will be further expanded in the cloud era.

Tip 3: Cloud workbench, rapid construction, and service integration in one constitute. The key Blue Whale platform mainly has three parts, providing a cloud workbench, a rapid construction platform, and then service integration.

Dang Shouhui introduced that the Blue Whale platform not only provides a wealth of tool SaaS services for game operators, but also provides PaaS services for developers. The Blue Whale PaaS cloud platform provides full-process tool development, debugging and hosting services, lowering the tool development threshold. After simple training, ordinary operation and maintenance can quickly produce operation tools and upload them to the market. At the same time, Blue Whale also connects a large number of atomic operations of the IaaS layer and the operating system layer, realizes flexible scheduling in the ESB platform, and provides it to the PaaS platform. In this way, when building scheduling automation tools, operation and maintenance does not need to connect interfaces and The scheduling logic is hard-coded, which further reduces the tool development threshold.

Tip 4: Blue Whale is basically to arm operation and maintenance rather than replace it, and to help operation and maintenance transformation

Blue Whale is Tencent Game Operation and Maintenance’s summary, refinement, conception, and The original intention of designing and building a system is to arm operation and maintenance so that it can provide higher-dimensional services, rather than replace operation and maintenance.

?The value of operation and maintenance is relatively low in traditional fields, and the cost of replacement is not high. Generally speaking, development is bound to the game, and generally does not appear as a public resource. If both games need to be refined, it is not appropriate for developers to do it at the same time. It is duplication of construction, and operation and maintenance Have the ability to do this. What Blue Whale needs to do is to strengthen operation and maintenance and upgrade the operation dimension. ?Dang Menghui explained the concept of Blue Whale this way.

In terms of necessity, Dang Shouhui said that the operation and maintenance of the game industry must be transformed. Nowadays, the game is fighting for channels and quality, and every traffic brought back by the product must find a way to stay here and settle down. On the one hand, the release time must be made shorter and shorter, or the capacity must be automatically expanded. The capacity cannot be expanded until it is full and users cannot access it. It must be more intelligent. There is also the issue of faults. For exception identification and assisted decision-making, operation and maintenance controls the entire environment. In addition, there is also the return of new players, how many players have been lost, and which players can come back. Operations and maintenance must provide constructive feedback on this information.

Under Tencent's open environment, the cloud has helped Blue Whale reach the top of game operation and maintenance management, minimizing the operation and maintenance threshold and improving operation and maintenance efficiency. During ChinaJoy 2015, Tencent Cloud once again demonstrated its leading advantages in the field of game cloud services, and stated that it will continue to open up various secret weapons within Tencent. Its unique capabilities cover development, testing, operation, payment and other aspects, which is bound to provide gaming services. The industry brings more value and more changes.