Online games backend are challenging applications, a single user generates one http call every few seconds, usage volume can spike very quickly and balance between data read and write is close to 50/50 which make the use of write through cache or other common scaling approaches not so effective.
Follow how in our quest for a better architecture to serve millions of games sessions daily and reduce our resource usage we took the decision to write in Erlang our third generation game backend, see how we’re leveraging the actor model in order to change how we use and conceive our persistency layer. See also how introducing Erlang as a new tool in a company is working out, what we found hard from an organizational and technical point of view, which obstacle we hit and how as technical guys we convinced our management to take the risk of bringing in house a different technology.

Target audience: This talk is addressed to those developers who are introducing or evaluating the introduction of erlang as a new tool for critical projects.

Talk objective: Sharing the history of the first erlang project in our company since the initial idea and evaluation through the first few months of actual implementation, will be shown how working on this project compares to similar projects using ruby and discussed how we're mixing the use of erlang and ruby for different purposes. This can be a useful base and term of comparison for others willing to follow this path.