Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that Japan’s DeNA, a leading provider of mobile and online services, has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider to accelerate innovation for the company’s game, sports, live streaming, and healthcare businesses. So far, DeNA has migrated the majority of the company’s workloads from its on premises environment to AWS. This enables DeNA to leverage an unmatched portfolio of cloud services, including database and machine learning (ML), to drive the global growth of new businesses like the popular Pococha live communication app, which has been downloaded 2.55 million times since its launch four years ago, and to delight its customers across the globe.
In 2017, DeNA built and launched the Pococha app, which lets users easily host their own live shows and interact with fans, in just three months on AWS. DeNA replaced its proprietary video distribution platform with Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS), a fully managed live streaming solution, to deliver video content on the app with lower latency and higher availability. This reduced the IT team’s operational burden of managing complex, distributed live video networks, and allowed DeNA to focus on providing app users with an improved user experience and enhanced real-time communication capabilities. DeNA also relied on AWS’s proven global infrastructure to support the expansion of Pococha into the United States in May 2021.
By migrating the company’s common mobile game platform to AWS, DeNA is also able to provide more reliable customer gaming services at lower cost. DeNA optimized its environment built on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with its engineering technologies, while leveraging Amazon Aurora, a fully managed relational database built for the cloud, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, and AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers that provides on-demand, right-sized compute capacity for containers, to modernize the common mobile game platform architecture. This modernization helps the company to eliminate the cost of managing DeNA’s infrastructure, and allows the company’s engineers to focus on game development. Using AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, and DeNA’s own scaling technologies, the company can optimize infrastructure costs by auto-scaling workloads on-demand. AWS security, identity, and compliance services, including AWS GuardDuty, support DeNA in running the company’s game and entertainment offerings in a secure and compliant way.
DeNA’s use of AWS to offer excitement to consumers is not limited to virtual spaces. The company also uses ML services like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Rekognition to analyze in-game data of DeNA’s Yokohama DeNA BayStars, one of 12 Japanese professional baseball teams, helping the team manager and players make data-assisted decisions.
DeNA is committed to upskilling the company’s employees in cloud technology. The company worked with AWS Training and Certification to design a cloud knowledge plan for both new university graduates and experienced IT professionals.
“At DeNA, we always challenge ourselves to delight our customers by constantly innovating. And with AWS, the world’s leading cloud, we’re able to serve more customers and stakeholders across our businesses,” said Tomoko Namba, founder and executive chairman at DeNA. “Migrating our workloads to AWS lets us access a global infrastructure with the industry’s broadest suite of cloud services, which shifts the focus of our teams to accelerating innovation. The speed at which we can prototype and roll out new services like Pococha using the cloud opens new business opportunities and helps us deliver a better customer experience.”
“We are excited to be helping DeNA to grow their existing business while rolling out new and innovative services like Pococha globally,” said Tadao Nagasaki, managing director, Amazon Web Services Japan. “We are committed to continuing to support DeNA’s efforts to provide new and engaging experiences for the company’s customers around the world.”
