How Zingbrain leverages the power of DigitalOcean Kubernetes

Stephen Lazarionok and Vladislav Artemyev have been in game and software development for over 10 years, and utilize multiple DigitalOcean products to host their platforms, Scorum and Zingbrain. Their AI-powered gaming engine utilizes DigitalOcean Kubernetes, Managed Databases, and Spaces Object Storage to deliver fast, stable performance to their users. As a small team of just 10 employees, cost, efficiency, and support were extremely important factors to them when choosing a cloud infrastructure provider, which is why they continue to turn to DigitalOcean as they grow their businesses.

Leveraging the power of DigitalOcean Kubernetes

Stephen and Vladislav started using DigitalOcean Kubernetes from day one as their primary deployment platform when building their gaming engine. They wanted a cloud provider that could support multiple tools and provide customization, and knew that DigitalOcean Kubernetes would be more cost-effective than hyperscalers such as Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. Since using DigitalOcean Kubernetes, they have been pleased with the durability of the platform, and have found the high availability control plane to be an excellent addition.

“The high availability control plane is a great addition, as it means we can be even more confident in the availability of hardware provided by you. We’ve never had an availability issue from DigitalOcean.” - Stephen Lazarionok

They are running their RestFul API on Kubernetes, using Python and the image registry to package applications and deploy them on Kubernetes. They deal with a large amount of data, and also utilize managed databases, including managed Postgres for transactional data and as a data warehouse, and managed Redis for user recommendations. They leverage DigitalOcean Spaces to transfer the data back and forth between their pipelines.

“The combination of Managed Databases, DigitalOcean Kubernetes, and DigitalOcean Spaces works great and is very efficient from a cost perspective. "We have some buckets that are a few terabytes that we wouldn’t be able to handle using only databases, so Spaces works well for that.” - Vladislav Artemyev

The simplicity of all of DigitalOcean’s products is a major draw for them, as they don’t have to deal with a lot of additional configurations that can lead to complexity. In addition, they rely on the in-depth documentation provided by DigitalOcean, and find that, even as a small business, DigitalOcean’s support and account management teams are easily accessible and willing to help them troubleshoot issues.

“We’ve had experience working with the team at a hyperscaler, and you can struggle even getting one call with the team, but here it’s quite different, and the account management team is very available to us.” - Vladislav Artemyev

As they acquire more customers, Stephen and Vladislav know that the cost of their cloud provider will be crucial in order for them to provide competitive pricing and acquire new customers. They process a large number of transactions and a huge amount of data, but their processing varies over time, so the fact that they can auto-scale up Kubernetes when they need it and bring it back down when they don’t need as much compute power is very valuable. They are excited to continue working with DigitalOcean and using DigitalOcean Kubernetes as they continue to grow their business