Nasuni Corporation announced support for the AWS for Games initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Nasuni for Game Builds. Using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as the backend storage cloud, Nasuni for Game Builds enables game developers and quality assurance (QA) testers to rapidly share and quickly collaborate with teams around the globe on complex game builds with large-scale assets, increasing gameplay quality and decreasing development and testing time. 

AWS for Games is an initiative featuring services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built specifically for games customers. The initiative makes it easier for game developers, publishers and platforms to select the right tools and partners to build, run and grow their games. For customers looking to accelerate deployments with solution-specific support, AWS for Games also identifies dedicated AWS Game Tech industry specialists, AWS services and leading AWS Partners in each solution area. 

While well-known management tools exist for developers to handle code and assets, today's games are often developed by global teams using a follow-the sun development and testing model. With legacy on-premises file shares, sharing artwork, game assets, prototypes and builds among far-flung teams is a challenging process that requires cumbersome sync or remote access tools, both of which can slow development and testing cycles.

Nasuni for Game Builds provides file data services built on Amazon S3. The gold copies of all file data are stored centrally in object storage, while copies of the working set are intelligently cached at the edge, delivering high-performance ‘local' access from any location. Changes to the local copies are automatically synchronized to Amazon S3 and then distributed to required edge locations. Files-in-use are locked globally to prevent version control issues.

Often, legacy on-premises backup approaches do not work for file data as the copy process cannot keep up with the size of file data. Nasuni for Game Builds automatically backs up all data on a schedule you set (as often as every few minutes) without slowing down the production environment and recovery of even extremely large files takes just minutes to execute.

As a result, game development organizations can:

• Shorten time to release games up to 25% and improve QA by increasing the number of builds available for testing each week up to 30x.
• Share and collaborate on game builds from anywhere without running out of capacity, and without compromising performance or security.
• Cut costs up to 50% by reducing or eliminating legacy on-premises file storage infrastructure. Meanwhile, game developers can protect valuable intellectual property (IP) with the ability to maintain unlimited copies.
• Ensure critical file data is protected from ransomware and critical failure.

"Modern game development requires large, global teams of developers, artists and testers working in a follow-the-sun model," said John Capello, vice president of strategy and field chief technology officer at Nasuni. "Nasuni works with AWS to provide a cloud-native global file system that enables organizations to easily share and collaborate on very large game files while also protecting them from corruption and loss, all while cutting the total cost of game storage in half."