Abstract
The advent of utility computing has revolutionized almost every sector of traditional software development. Especially commercial cloud computing services, pioneered by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have provided an unprecedented opportunity for the fast and sustainable development of complex distributed systems. Nevertheless, existing models and tools aim primarily for systems where resource usage—by humans and bots alike—is logically and physically quite disperse resulting in a low likelihood of conflicting resource access. However, a number of resource-intensive applications, such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and large-scale simulations introduce a requirement for a very large common state with many actors accessing it simultaneously and thus a high likelihood of conflicting resource access. This paper presents a systematic mapping study of the state-of-the-art in software technology aiming explicitly to support the development of MMOGs, a class of large-scale, resource-intensive software systems. By examining the main focus of a diverse set of related publications, we identify a list of criteria that are important for MMOG development. Then, we categorize the selected studies based on the inferred criteria in order to compare their approach, unveil the challenges faced in each of them and reveal research trends that might be present. Finally we attempt to identify research directions which appear promising for enabling the use of standardized technology for this class of systems.
Highlights
Cloud computing has revolutionized almost all aspects of software production
Resource-intensive applications—such as Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) backends—have certain peculiarities and distinct requirements when compared to other types of software—such as web applications—which have long been deployed on the cloud
This study focuses on MMOGs as this class of applications highlights a unique set of properties: a very large number of users and a very large system state—normally spanning across several computing nodes—and a high likelihood of conflicting resource usage
Summary
Cloud computing has revolutionized almost all aspects of software production. While the term cloud computing was coined many years ago [2], it is still widely used to describe a range of technologies. These are commonly classified in layers such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and so forth. The Web is the killer app of cloud computing, which explains to a large extent the design of some PaaS-based frameworks—for example, Google’s AppEngine [3] is largely based on the servlet which was itself designed to facilitate large-scale Web-based systems [4]. While we focus on MMOGs, most findings apply to other large scale systems such as scientific, educational, training or military simulations
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