More than meets the eye: transforming IT at Jagex - an interview with head of IT Barry Zubel

Barry Zubel, head of IT at game developer Jagex, tells Danny Palmer about virtualising servers, automation and how IT infrastructure will be key to a smooth launch for their next big release

In RuneScape, the online multiplayer role-playing game from developer Jagex, players can take on fantastical quests in a mythical world.

In Cambridge, the city where the studio is based, the tasks aren't quite as mystical, but as Jagex head of IT Barry Zubel told Computing, their completion will reap rewards for both developers and players as the studio prepares to launch its next blockbuster title: Transformers Universe.

"Our biggest project is virtualisation and that's going to be a big winner for us," he said, describing how "we've historically not virtualised anything operationally" due to the limits it would put on game performance – but that's changing.

"The way we've managed to get that through is we initially used virtualisation in our test and QA environments, and that's worked really well," said Zubel. Benefits from this included a reduced need for physical servers and greater flexibility.

But while many of the servers on which the games run aren't likely to be virtualised, a lot of the infrastructure behind them will go that way.

"That doesn't mean we're going to be running all our front-end game servers virtualised, that's still unlikely to happen. But it does mean a lot of the back-end infrastructure is moving towards virtualisation," he said, going on to explain how a change in the perception of virtualisation has made it easier to sell the concept to his team.

"Historically, it's been something that developers haven't trusted but now we've actually been able to prove to them it works and is reliable. It's actually very cost-effective and it allows you to make the best use of the physical hardware that you've got," he said.

Those servers, Zubel explained, are designed to be available even in the event of a component failure, so as to not disrupt people playing Jagex games.

"We design everything to be N+1 redundant, and I mean everything. Each of our sites themselves, we can physically lose an entire site and it won't affect the playability of RuneScape. What will happen is people will get disconnected then redirected to one of our other sites," he said, adding that services can be moved to ensure services are rapidly spun up again.

"We have the ability to move the applications around our front-end servers very, very quickly. So if we did physically lose a server, we can have that up and running again in a minute."

Zubel also discussed configuration management at Jagex, describing the systems engineering process as "absolutely number one the best thing we have".

"From being able to have a server physically installed to being operational, you're probably at less than eight minutes now, that's all down to configuration management," he said. "We've written an entire ecosystem of add-ons and scripts to our configuration management system, just to do things that are very specifically for our games."

Those games hinge on providing stable online connections to players, which is why Jagex has more than 500 physical servers spread across the globe.

"The closer we can push the game servers to our customers, the better the connectivity," said Zubel, who added that while RuneScape is able to function on high latency connections, the upcoming Transformers Universe isn't so tolerant, so Jagex has been attempting to install servers nearer to players.

"Transformers is a little less forgiving because of the game that it is, so we've been looking at placing servers in places where players will be," he said.

As well as servers, the everyday running and continued development of Jagex games rely heavily on business intelligence and analytics, as Zubel explained.

"BI is a very important part of the business and actually drives a lot of the things that we do.

"We have a lot of hardware allocated internally for analytics clusters, it's a very big part of what we do. It has driven a lot of changes in RuneScape and it is also set up to drive a lot of changes in Transformers as well."

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More than meets the eye: transforming IT at Jagex - an interview with head of IT Barry Zubel

Barry Zubel, head of IT at game developer Jagex, tells Danny Palmer about virtualising servers, automation and how IT infrastructure will be key to a smooth launch for their next big release

As head of IT, much of Zubel's time is spent managing Jagex's Windows systems, but in future a lot of this work will – he hopes – be automated.

"Systems administration, generally in my opinion, is about making yourself eventually redundant. If you can automate and make it so you can come into the office every day and your job is being done for you, then you've done a good job," he said.

"No one ever gets to that point but it's always about scratching that itch, that thing you have to do every day that annoys you, you automate it."

Jagex's desktops are "primarily Windows 7", with some developers working on Macs, but Jagex is also experimenting with Windows 8 "to evaluate how well it works with our build tools". So far the results have been "fairly positive", Zubel said.

"We can't stay in the past, at some point we're going to have to move to Windows 8 or perhaps its successor," Zubel said. "Historically, Microsoft have always switched between a good OS and a bad OS at each release, so hopefully Windows 9 will be the one that everyone loves."

Tablets are also becoming an increasingly important part of Jagex's IT arsenal works, reflecting the firm's growing mobile gaming output.

"We're flexible in what we offer people and also allow people to bring their own devices to some extent," he said.

"[BYOD is] not universal, it's on approval basis, but once we actually have people with their own devices they generally tend to be more comfortable taking their own iPad or something away with them," Zubel said. "They have access to their mail, essential things that we need and it saves us having to provide them with a device."

This flexible attitude to devices also extends to smartphones.

"We support iPhone, we support Android, we support BlackBerry. It's basically what the user themselves wants to have," Zubel explained.

"We used a product called AirWatch, which allows us to manage the BYOD stuff rather well on both iPhone and Android," he said, before going on to describe his main challenge - Wi-Fi capabilities of Android devices.

"The only challenge I can think of is Android needs someone to fix their Wi-Fi stuff. Their Wi-Fi is great for consumer use, but for enterprise-grade wireless it's not great. It's something Apple's very good at."

Security

Zubel said his team works hard to protect Jagex's intellectual property.

"We have taken lots of steps at pretty much every layer to secure both our operational and development infrastructure, but also to segregate them, which is actually very important," he said.

"The whole network design is very privileged and segregated. So if there was ever an attack or vulnerability, an attacker's ability to pivot around the network is much reduced," he added.

Looking to the future, Zubel described how his main goal in the short to medium term is to ensure the IT infrastructure is in place to support the launch of Jagex's next online multiplayer game.

"Twelve months ahead, looking back, the one thing I'd like to have achieved is a stable and quiet release of Transformers Universe," he said.

"We've been ramping up the number of players in Transformers, just to make sure our internal systems can handle the loads put on them. Everything is looking great so far, but we can't predict how it's going to go. A stable and quiet launch is the goal," Zubel concluded.