Pokemon Go, servers collapse and AWS irony is unleashed
It was February 1996 when for the first time with the Game Boy you could throw the ball and catch Pikatchu and company.
No, we’re not crazy, we’re talking about Pokemon. At that time, not even Satoshi Tajiri, the inventor, would have imagined seeing his creatures again, twenty years later, in a smartphone application capable of breaking all records.
What is it?
Pokemon Go
is a video game that allows you to find cute creatures around the city, in the streets we usually walk, in squares, parks, in front of churches. To see them, all you have to do is point your smartphone’s camera at the real world as if it were a magnifying glass. And it’s Pokemon mania right away.
Currently, the app has been distributed in the United States, Australia and Japan, while in Italy it will land on July 15th. The news, however, is that after only 13 hours of release, the game reached number one on the list of the most downloaded apps for iPhone. But that’s not all. It has already leapfrogged Tinder and Twitter in the number of downloads and has even surpassed porn in the number of Google searches. Suffice it to say that from the official YouPorn account came the congratulatory tweet to NintendoAmerica.
Problems with Servers.
In the last 24 hours, network traffic has been so intense that it has completely saturated the servers that they have not been able to comply with the demands of an audience increasingly hungry for challenges. The UK and the Netherlands, in particular, have temporarily paused servers. It is not uncommon for such an event to occur, dictated above all by the novelty of the moment and the desire to try a new gaming experience.
The irony of Amazon Web Service.
Meanwhile, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Service, offered to offer support on Twitter through cloud hosting that allows you to maintain and guarantee the availability of the product regardless of the level of network traffic. All this without avoiding biting sarcasms. Pokemon Go, in fact, is hosted on Google’s cloud. So the CTO of AWS, while in Cape Town for the AWS Summit, tweeted sharply: “Friends of NianticLabs, please let us know if we can help you.”
Once the issue was resolved, Vogels continued on Twitter: “Thank you NianaticLabs for fixing the pokemon go server issues, but no, I’m not going to jump from the mountains of Cape Town.”
Also in this circumstance, AWS demonstrates how Cloud Computing guarantees scalability, performance and reduced costs for companies that aim at the reliability of their systems and guarantee the availability of the product.
Augmented reality goes mainstream.
Let’s make it clear right away that this is not a simple re-release of a game that has fascinated a generation, there is more. For example, the choice to use augmented reality as the setting of the game.
Already in the past there are those who have tried to try their hand at applications capable of mixing the virtual with the real. Niantic itself (Google’s internal start-up) had developed Ingress, a game based on the search for geolocated targets. Never, however, before Pokemon Go, had this pattern of interaction been seen used in such an intuitive, simple and lightweight way.
But now “
Gotta catch ’em all
“!
