EPIC ONLINE SERVICES

EPAM partnered with Epic Games to develop Epic Online Services, which enables global creators and developers to launch, operate and scale gaming experiences on any engine, store or platform. Together, the two partners shifted from a microservices architecture to a first-of-its-kind digital platform that supports the global gaming community, at the scale of Epic Games’ own blockbuster hit Fortnite. 

As part of its work on Epic Online Services, EPAM partnered with Epic Games to develop a highly available core service for authentication, authorization and account management, along with the UI. The service and UI were integrated with third-party systems, such as Google, Facebook, PSN, XBL and VK. EPAM also helped improve game party support by creating a separate Party Service that allows players to manage in-game parties. To enable players to interact more seamlessly, EPAM worked with Epic Games to develop a service for chat and notifications that can handle tens of millions of user connections and requests. It also allows Epic Games to track user presence (whether online, offline or away), and send private and group messages to players’ game platform. EPAM also supported Epic Games in storing and processing user friend lists, block lists, privacy settings and friendship recommendations. Through capacity planning, EPAM developed a friend management system that enables billions of friendship interactions and allows Epic Games to handle millions of requests per minute to support player interaction. 

GAME INFRASTRUCTURE

EPAM began collaborating with Epic Games on game infrastructure even before the launch of Fortnite, starting with the initial development of the platform through to today. Epic Games’ infrastructure platform provides provisioning and deployment capabilities for its game services, as well as unified logging and monitoring. The platform is built on AWS and is compliant with various regulations, including Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

Through the close partnership between EPAM and Epic Games, the engineering team was able to build a platform with impressive scalability and reliability that can sustain Fortnite’s incredible 100x growth with 350 million players around the world. The platform supports tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and is constantly adapting based on load requirements and peaks in player usage during Fortnite’s global events or product launches. Epic Games leverages EPAM’s global presence to provide 24x7 follow-the-sun support services with a reaction time of just a few minutes in case of any unexpected system behaviors. The recent release of Epic Online Services required Epic Games and EPAM to partner once again to create innovative solutions that enable multi-tenancy of the platform along with strengthening security.

SECURITY

Leveraging security monitoring in the cloud to maximize cost-effectiveness and minimize impact on business-related assets and processes, EPAM and Epic Games performed entity behavior analysis and identified unexpected and potentially malicious activities across company assets. Together, the companies deployed a Security Operations Center (SOC), in addition to the vulnerability management program for customer infrastructure and enterprise applications. The SOC improved security incident detection through continuous monitoring and analysis of data activity using a combination of cloud tools. By analyzing this activity across Epic Games’ networks, endpoints, servers and databases 24/7, the SOC enabled the company to defend against incidents and intrusions, regardless of the source, time of day or type of attack. 

FORTNITE TESTING  

Epic Games was looking for experienced Fortnite gamers to test out the new season and all its features before its release to millions of users worldwide. As part of its test IO platform, EPAM leveraged its crowdsourced network of software testers to perform test documentation writing, regression testing, feature testing, Fritter event testing, bug reproduction and verification and game play testing on PC and mobile platforms. Through this testing phase, EPAM and Epic Games were able to detect bugs and fix any performance issues before the launch of the new season. 

PLAYER ENGAGEMENT TOOL

To increase player engagement through user segmentation and personalization by language and time zone, Epic Games and EPAM partnered together to build its push notification service for several game titles, including Fortnite. EPAM worked with Epic Games for end-to-end development of the web tool to manage the notifications, which was integrated with the data warehouse that stored all production data, as well as the existing communication service that handles transporting the notifications. With the new service, Epic Games has a centralized, flexible and simplified management system for all notifications, enabling the company to easily reach out to target players to keep them informed about limited time modes, new features or merchandise items.