Case Study: Hiber

How Hiber used Edgegap to eliminate guesswork out of server capacity planning

Customer

Hiber is an ambitious company from Sweden building a universally accessible web-first, no-code, free-to-use metaverse platform.

Their platform, HiberWorld, removes all the barriers to entry for anyone to create, play, and participate in a user-generated collaborative Metaverse world, including games and interactive experiences. HiberWorld already supports millions of interconnected virtual worlds—and it’s just getting started.

Problem

Managing a major worldwide virtual world infrastructure like Hiber’s requires a significant investment in tools and engineering resources. Hiber’s engineering team faced a puzzle that most studios struggle with: how to ensure their multiplayer worlds can scale quickly worldwide without sacrificing performance—and remain as cost-effective as possible?

Solution

Fresh from the experience of scaling from 0 to 500,000 DAU in a single day on another game project, Edgegap was ready to take on HiberWorld’s game hosting challenges.

Edgegap’s server orchestration platform, which provides HiberWorld with unlimited scaling potential and rapid scalability capabilities, enabled the team to resolve their high scalability pain point without much development effort required. Moreover, it allows Hiber to deploy multiplayer servers instantaneously without the need for active server management. Also, thanks to Edgegap’s multi-provider approach, the platform has the potential to scale indefinitely because a single supplier does not constrain it.

Instead of going the classic route and reserving machines, buying bare-metal, and booking Cloud VM in multiple locations, Edgegap gave Hiber the flexibility to effectively and automatically manage its resource allocation based on its worldwide player demand.

Solution

From the beginning, testing Edgegap’s solution was straightforward as Hiberworld was already running in a Linux environment, with containerization only a few steps away.

To assess the scalability and quality of the player experience, the Hiber team initiated a preliminary soft rollout with Edgegap, launching the game’s new version in a few specific Asia-Pacific regions. 

Following a successful soft launch, Hiber rolled out worldwide with the peace of mind that Edgegap’s highly scalable and distributed would be there to handle the player demand when and where needed. 

“Edgegap saved us many months of resources planning and development by allowing us to tap into a gigantic pool of computing resources on demand and instantaneously. We don’t have to worry about how and where our servers should scale; Edgegap does the heavy lifting, and we can put our focus back into making the greatest game experience for our players.”

Benefits

• Hiber does not pay for expensive under-used capacity

• Ability to launch worldwide without making predictions on server capacity for specific regions – Simplicity

• Resiliency to mitigate downtimes from any one provider, such as Azure and AWS; switches are made within seconds

• Version management is made simple with each new version containerized and launched on-demand

Results

7.596s average deployment time put 

Conclusion

Instead of relying on the status-quo by using expensive but under-utilized bare-metal and cloud servers, Edgegap offered Hiber a completely new approach by scaling multiplayer servers instantly when the company needed it. This made it easy to mount and distribute servers close to users at a low cost based on player usage.