Players Sharding By Geographic Position

Context

If we only have a single service handling the data for the entire population, we will limit ourselves in the following area:

• Space: We might not have enough storage space to handle such as a high volume of data.
• Processing: The computing resources to process all this data might be too great resulting in extended response times.
• Bandwidth: We might exceed network bandwidth.
• Geography: We might experience high latency.

Solution

We can divide the data into horizontal partitions or shards. For example, we can have different service for US-EAST, US-WEST, EU-WEST, EU-EAST, etc. Since people are generally more willing to play with others that close to them, this should not be an issue.

Considerations

Nevertheless, if players of different zone wants to play together, we should allow them to form a party.