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Services like PlayStation Now, Stadia or GameFly allow players to play games that are run on remote servers on local devices, eliminating the need for specialized console hardware or powerful personal computers, outside of the necessary bandwidth for Internet connectivity. These otherwise operate similar to game services, in that the library of available titles may be added to or removed from over time, depending on the service.

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Dedicated Servers In Gears of War 3: Scaling to Millions of Players

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Ever wonder why games have dedicated servers for FPS, how much client and non-client code is needed to achieve such a goal, and what the infrastructure requirements are? Here is your chance to see how Gears of War 3 conquered the...

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GamesIndustry.biz This is the first time you've shown CryEngine 3 off publicly, what's been the early reaction to it so far?

Cevat Yerli

We've had really high-profile meetings with executives and reactions have ranged from "we've never seen this before" to "are you sure this is running on PlayStation 3?" I promise you, on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 it looks absolutely the same, there's no difference. When we show it, we show it side by side and there's no difference. In fact the PS3 version is running a tick faster but that's only coincidence and they'll be equal.

GamesIndustry.biz Obviously Crytek is known for creating cutting-edge first-person shooters for the PC. Is the interest from developers looking to license the technology for similar titles and formats?

Cevat Yerli

That's the most obvious, but there are also racing game developers, MMO developers, fighting game developers. We're talking to a range of developers right now. We looked at our schedule and we're talking to the guys who have made almost all of the top twenty games of the past two years. We're seeing a variety of developers concentrating on different genres, and varied platform needs. Some are only looking at PlayStation 3, some are multiplatform. It's every style.

GamesIndustry.biz This is also the first time you've shown your work running on home consoles - are you confident you can support developers who want to use the CryEngine 3 for console projects, considering Crytek has not made its own console title yet?

Cevat Yerli

We're very confident. We're working very closely with Microsoft and Sony and we know what it takes to create a Triple A title. We know how many assets you need for a PC title and the good thing is that we can push that same amount of data on a console now, which typically developers find much more constrictive and with less content. So we've come with a top down approach rather than bottom up.

Sony and Microsoft were amazed at what we can actually achieve by that approach. They said "you can't do this, you can't do that" and we challenge this knowledge. Overall, the fidelity we achieved, as well as the support structure that's in place already, it's a case that those that are using the engine are getting what they need. We have game developers, we have a dedicated licensing support team, there's training support, and they are ready to handle a lot of licensees. We've built this system over the past two years and we have dedicated support.

GamesIndustry.biz How important is it for Crytek to establish CryEngine 3 as the leading engine for the next evolution of hardware beyond the PS3 and Xbox 360?

Cevat Yerli

We look at it this way; at a company like Crytek, we are in place to make kick-ass games, Triple-A games, they are not short-sighted. When we develop games we always want to prepare for the future. We always look out for the future as far forward as we can. And so because it's in our culture, we said to ourselves, "why not offer a forward thinking engine?" CryEngine is the technology that allows you to look out for the future by being next-gen ready. That means if you know you want to make a PS3, Xbox 360 and PC game, you may also want to be looking at a version for the next Xbox or the next PlayStation. If you want that, this is the engine of choice because it can scale up, it can scale down. It can deliver top-notch quality on all platforms now and you can have a head start on development. You can have characters, resolution, quality, interaction, physics set-up, AI, and it will scale up and down, depending on the platform.

If I want to make a next-gen launch title I could do that by pushing the boundaries of the engine. For me that's significant because we offer this as an enabler for people like us to look out to the future and deliver in the future. Typically an engine is designed, if it's for PS3 you can develop on the PS3 and you're done with it. When the next hardware comes along you have to start again. It's 2009 and Triple-A games take two to three years to develop. So if a game takes 36 months to develop then you better be ready for the next-generation. That's our assumption. Because when we start games now we want them to be next-gen ready too.

GamesIndustry.biz You've said before the you're expecting the next iteration of console hardware to be out in 2011, 2012. Do you still believe that?

Cevat Yerli

Yes. I'm not sure that it's the case for all platforms, but my gut feeling is there will be a new platform by the end of 2011. Whether another arrives in 2012 or 2013 is hard to say. And which is first, I don't want to comment [laughs].

GamesIndustry.biz So you don't subscribe to the theory that this generation of console will be around for 10 years, or even much longer past five years...

Cevat Yerli

I think one of them will be longer on the market than the other.

GamesIndustry.biz You mean the PlayStation 3?

Cevat Yerli

That might be the case. Unless it's the other way around [laughs]. Whatever happens, we don't want developers to be the victims of change and repositioning. We don't want to be the victim of ambiguous politics or complications. Our lifecycle depends on releasing new games. We decided to decouple from that, we wanted to make an engine that's ready for next-gen inherently. Because whatever the next-generation will be, it will be more parallelism, more computation of what already exists. We are ready for that. Writing the driver layers for the next PlayStation or next Xbox will be quite simple for us. As soon as that knowledge becomes public, we'll be on it. And all those people working with CryEngine 3 will get an update and they'll be on it as well. That's why we made it next-gen ready, so that none of us are victims of new hardware.

GamesIndustry.biz Although a PC developer, you've always been very interested in home consoles. Is there even more pressure now to release a console project to show off what you can do and what the CryEngine 3 can achieve on consoles?

Cevat Yerli

Is there pressure? Yes. Are we doing something, I cannot comment. Frankly, let's put it this way, we are not just working on an engine just for the sake of developing an engine. Let's wait and see.

GamesIndustry.biz You acquired Free Radical Design recently, which became Crytek UK. How's that integration coming along?

Cevat Yerli

It was such a good move. They can speak better than anybody else about this, but I feel their motivation is very high. From what I hear from the management that is actually running this studio, after the troubles, a lot of people who left the company have now come back. We had 40 staff when we acquired it, it's now grown to 60. That speaks for itself. They feel like they're moving in a new direction. I'm hearing good reports every week. Motivation is high. The project they're working on and the technology they are equipped with is super exciting. It's been a win-win. When we met with the team we instantly new we had to work with them. Their heart, their vision, is just right. They were just victims of business practices and there were some external factors and it was a shame that happened.

GamesIndustry.biz It was a big move, to acquire a full team rather than staffing up through normal recruitment methods. Are you interested in other similar sized acquisitions?

Cevat Yerli

Not really. We've been asked a lot if there was a strategy or a plan behind it, but there wasn't really. It was a laid back decision. I was following what happened there, I really liked their work. There was always a quality there, and we could see they were a team who cared about games. They're dedicated and passionate about games.

When you see that, you don't want to lose it. You want to make sure that passion continues, and I think we've got the management that enables them to do that. They were unfortunate victims of external events that didn't allow them to succeed. We wanted to be in the UK anyway, we wanted to be there within a year, and we thought, well, maybe we can be there within four weeks. That was it. We worked out a quick plan spanning long-terms interests, because this was not about short term IP gain, and when we met them it confirmed what we knew. With CryEngine 3, with that many team members under the Crytek framework and knowledge about IP creation, the team will just excel. We were very German in our approach. Very precise [laughs].

GamesIndustry.biz There's been a lot of buzz around cloud gaming, and Crysis is on display at the OnLive stand during GDC. How are you working with them?

Cevat Yerli

We're not involved, we just allowed Crysis to be tested on it.

GamesIndustry.biz What do you think to the technology?

Cevat Yerli

The technology of video-based rendering is not actually a very new concept but they do some things that others didn't do before so it will be interesting to see. We had our research in 2005 on this subject but we stopped around 2007 because we had doubts about economics of scale. But that was at a time when bandwidth was more expensive. And we saw that 2013 - 2015 with the development of bandwidths and household connections worldwide that it might become more viable then. It's a technical burden. It doesn't take a lot to make a video-based renderer, but what you need is the right infrastructure that is beyond the technology we have, it's more like cable net providers and communication networks. They have to provide fast bandwidths and connectivity in order to allow such technology to excel. So as it was dependent on somebody else, we decided to wait.

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From my twenty minutes with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli at the Game Developers Conference, it's clear the company is thinkin...

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Quality of experience (QoE) in cloud gaming models: A review 

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Quality of experience (QoE) in cloud gaming models: A review 

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Article type: Research Article

Affiliations: [a] Computer Networks and Security Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China | [b] State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China | [c] School of Mechatronics, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China | [d] QUEST Nawabshah, Sindh, Pakistan | [e] School of Engineering, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Asif Ali Laghari, Computer Networks and Security Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China. %****␣mgs-15-mgs190313_temp.tex␣Line␣25␣**** E-mail: [email protected] .

Abstract: Cloud gaming is a new way of online gaming, which renders the game data on the cloud side instead of the end user's system and is forwarded via a high-speed network. In cloud gaming; game software and emulators run on the high-speed server of cloud and services available for users on the commercial and free basis. Users can use rendered data of game from the cloud using thin heterogeneous devices via the Internet to play the game anytime and anywhere. The popularity of cloud gaming has increased since the late 2000s which attract the industry and academia. Quality of experience (QoE) domain has been added in cloud gaming models to assess user satisfaction, enjoyment, and needs during online gaming. In this research paper; we survey and analyze the previous cloud gaming models and models and offer aspects of future development; which will help to give the quality of service (QoS) according to service level agreement (SLA) and increase user satisfaction level for cloud gaming, hence, improving the overall QoE.

Keywords: Quality of experience (QoE), quality of service (QoS), network parameters, cloud gaming

DOI: 10.3233/MGS-190313

Journal: Multiagent and Grid Systems, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 289-304, 2019

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Quality of experience (QoE) in cloud gaming models: A review

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Cloud gaming is a new way of online gaming, which renders the game data on the cloud side instead of the end user's system and is forwarded via a high-speed network. In cloud gaming; game software and emulators run on the high-speed server of cloud a

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Server-based gaming, or SBG, is a solution employed by video lotteries and casinos to operate Video Lottery Terminals (VLTs) and Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs), the latter commonly referred to as slot machines. An SBG system includes a central system and gaming terminals which connect to the central system. SBG systems may be operated locally over a LAN or span large geographical areas, even entire nations, over a WAN, such as the Internet.

SBG systems differentiate themselves from other types of video lottery and casino systems by centralizing both game logic and Random number generation. Game terminals in an SBG system must per definition be authorized and connected to the central system in order to function, something that is not true for systems where all critical game components reside locally in the terminal.

SBG shares its roots with Server Supported Gaming (SSG). Both types of systems are examples of server centric gaming, which means that they share some similarities. Server centric gaming combines classic video poker and video lottery with features of a modern client-server computer network. Compared to traditional standalone slot machines, SBG and SSG systems facilitate automated remote game and configuration management for example.

SBG further builds upon the server centric gaming concept with technology and design principles from thin client computing and online gaming, thus making it fundamentally different from SSG, which employs thick client game terminals that have more in common with standalone terminals. The development of SBG has been driven by technological advancements and the benefits made possible thereof.

"For example, a system described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,409,602 is known as a casino game system of this sort. This system comprises a server and a plurality of clients, and the server can execute a plurality of game programs. Each client can access the plurality of game programs that the server executes, and a game image created by the accessed game program is displayed on a display unit of the client. Thereafter, a player can play a game from the game program being executed by the server by performing the game operation to the client. A typical conventional casino game system comprises a plurality of independent game devices, and each game device independently executes a game program. According to the system described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,409,602, most of the functions that each game device in this typical conventional casino game system is equipped with can be centralized in the server. In this way, each client only needs to be equipped with minimum functions, i.e. user interfaces (display unit and operation accepting unit) and a communication function that enables communication with the server. This dramatically reduces the costs for both hardware and software in the entire casino game system." "CASINO GAME SYSTEM AND CASINO GAME TERMINAL THAT CAN BE USED THEREIN", United States Patent Application 20070213134, "Background of the Invention" section.

SBG represents a paradigm shift from both standalone terminals and SSG because game logic and RNG reside on the server in an SBG system. Frequently mentioned benefits of SBG include:

Multi-channel gaming, which allows players to access games on other platforms as well, such as mobile phones for example.

Linked gaming content, support for wide area multiplayer and progressive jackpots.

Instant access to any game available in an operator's catalogue, enabling a long tail effect. This can be compared to standalone gaming terminals, which require games to be installed on location by changing a computer chip (or EPROM), or SSG, which requires that the complete game is downloaded before it can be played.

Personalization through the use of player profiles.

Lower hardware, software and maintenance costs for game terminals, due to their thin client nature.

Real-time monitoring of game terminal status and game transactions.

Higher security, since the RNG and game logic can't be manipulated at individual game terminals.

More control - software, hardware and peripherals can be disabled if digital signature verification fails. Compared to standalone and SSG terminals, unauthorized SBG terminals can't be operated since they rely on the central system in order to function.

Responsible gaming features that require advanced monitoring capabilities.

Reduced risk of piracy, since only the client components of games are stored locally in game terminals.

GLI (Gaming Laboratories International) has created a standard (GLI #21) which includes requirements and definitions for Server Centric Gaming systems, referred to as Client-Server Systems (CSS). GLI differentiates between Server Based Gaming Systems (SBGS) and Server Supported Gaming Systems (SSGS). GLI defines SBGS as "The combination of a server and client terminals in which the entire or integral portion of game content resides on the server." SSGS is defined as "The combination of a server and client terminal(s) which together allow the transfer of the entire control program and game content to the client terminal(s)..."

GLI certifies SBG and SSG systems according to the GLI #21 standard, something which is a requirement by many operators and jurisdictions for them to consider and allow such systems. Currently, SBG systems are allowed in several countries and US states, both through GLI certification and local legislation.

There are several server centric systems in production all over the world. Most of these are SSG systems, though they are often referred to as SBG systems. The video lottery system of the Norwegian state owned lottery Norsk Tipping is an example of an actual SBG system currently in operation.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Server-based gaming, or SBG, is a solution employed by video lotteries and casinos to operate Video Lottery Terminals (VLTs) and Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs), the latter commonly referred to as slot machines. An SBG system includes a central system and gaming terminals which connect to the central system.

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A game server (also sometimes referred to as a host) is a server which is the authoritative source of events in a multiplayer video game. The server transmits enough data about its internal state to allow its connected clients to maintain their own accurate version of the game world for display to players. They also receive and process each player's input.

Dedicated servers simulate game worlds without supporting direct input or output, except that required for their administration. Players must connect to the server with separate client programs in order to see and interact with the game.

The foremost advantage of dedicated servers is their suitability for hosting in professional data centers, with all of the reliability and performance benefits that entails. Remote hosting also eliminates the low-latency advantage that would otherwise be held by any player who hosts and connects to a server from the same machine or local network.

Dedicated servers cost money to run, however. Cost is sometimes met by a game's developers (particularly on consoles) and sometimes by clan groups, but in either case, the public is reliant on third parties providing servers to connect to. For this reason, most games which use dedicated servers also provide listen server support. Players of these games will oftentimes host servers for the public and their clans, either by hosting a server instance from their own hardware, or by renting from a game server hosting provider.

Listen servers run in the same process as a game client. They otherwise function like dedicated servers, but typically have the disadvantage of having to communicate with remote players over the residential internet connection of the hosting player. Performance is also reduced by the simple fact that the machine running the server is also generating an output image. Furthermore, listen servers grant anyone playing on them directly a large latency advantage over other players and cease to exist when that player leaves the game.

However, listen servers have the advantage of being essentially free and not requiring any special infrastructure or forward planning to set up, which makes them common at LAN parties where latency and bandwidth issues are not a concern. They are also common in console games.

Host migration

In a listen server arrangement, "host migration" is a useful feature. Without host migration, if the player that is currently hosting disconnects for any reason (quitting, crashing, lost network connection, etc.), the current server stops functioning and gameplay ends. A host migration feature allows one of the other players to become designated as the new host, so that the game can continue.

In the client/server model outlined elsewhere in this article, clients receive processed data from the server and display it without much thought. In the alternative "peer-to-peer" model there is no server: each "peer" instead receives the raw input streams of each other player and determines the results itself.

Peer-to-peer is generally considered obsolete for action games, but it is still common in the real-time strategy genre due to its suitability for games with large numbers of tokens and small numbers of players. Instead of constantly transmitting the positions of 1000 troops, the game can make a one-off transmission of the fact that 1000 troops are selected and that the player in command of them just issued a move order.

However, peer-to-peer has many disadvantages:

It is very difficult to keep all peers synchronized. Minute differences between peers can escalate over time to game-breaking paradoxes.

It is very difficult to support new peers joining part-way through a game.

Each peer must communicate with all other peers, limiting the number of connected players.

Each peer must wait for every other peer's message before simulating the next "network frame", resulting in all players experiencing the same latency as the player with the worst connection.

Multiple listen servers collectively peer amongst themselves for listen-peer setting. This type of setting avoids the disadvantages of peer-to-peer communications among all clients and is a better alternative to dedicated servers for increased number of clients.[citation needed ]

The rate at which a game server runs simulation steps is commonly referred to as its "tickrate". A "tick" is a number associated with each simulation step which is broadcast to clients to help them synchronise with the server.{9}

There are three reasons to limit the frequency of server simulation steps to a predefined tickrate: to conserve server and client bandwidth, to conserve server CPU time, and to allow clients to be certain of how much time has elapsed between each tick. The last point is important for internet games, as network updates from the server can arrive at different intervals or even an incorrect order.

Servers, particularly those of PC games, can generally be customized in ways that still allow unaltered clients to connect to them. These customizations can include tweaks to built-in game settings, content that is downloaded by clients when they join the game, and new code which changes the way that the server behaves.

While server customization is popular with server administrators and players, it can be at odds with the desire of developers and other players for the game to be experienced as intended. It can also aggravate players by enabling abusive administrators to lie about what their server offers.

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A game server (also sometimes referred to as a host) is a server which is the authoritative source of events in a multiplayer video game. The server transmits enough data about its internal state to allow its connected clients to maintain their own accurate version of the game world for display to players.

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Cloud computing metaphor: the group of networked elements providing services does not need to be addressed or managed individually by users; instead, the entire provider-managed suite of hardware and software can be thought of as an amorphous cloud.

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

Definition

The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology's definition of cloud computing identifies "five essential characteristics":

On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).

Resource pooling. The provider's computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand.

Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.

Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

Cloud computing has a rich history that extends back to the 1960s, with the initial concepts of time-sharing becoming popularized via Remote Job Entry (RJE). The "data center" model, where users submitted jobs to operators to run on mainframes, was predominantly used during this era. This was a time of exploration and experimentation with ways to make large-scale computing power available to more users through time-sharing, optimizing the infrastructure, platform, and applications, and increasing efficiency for end users.

The use of the "cloud" metaphor to denote virtualized services traces back to 1994, when it was used by General Magic to describe the universe of "places" that mobile agents in the Telescript environment could go. This metaphor is credited to David Hoffman, a General Magic communications employee, based on its long-standing use in networking and telecom. The expression cloud computing became more widely known in 1996 when the Compaq Computer Corporation drew up a business plan for future computing and the Internet. The company's ambition was to supercharge sales with "cloud computing-enabled applications". The business plan foresaw that online consumer file storage would most likely be commercially successful. As a result, Compaq decided to sell server hardware to internet service providers.

In the 2000s, the application of cloud computing began to take shape with the establishment of Amazon Web Services in 2002, which allowed developers to build applications independently. In 2006 the beta version of Google Docs was released, Amazon Simple Storage Service, known as Amazon S3, and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), in 2008 NASA's development of the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds.

The following decade saw the launch of various cloud services. In 2010, Microsoft launched Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace Hosting and NASA initiated an open-source cloud-software project, OpenStack. IBM introduced the IBM SmartCloud framework in 2011, and Oracle announced the Oracle Cloud in 2012. In December 2019, Amazon launched AWS Outposts, a service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer data centers, co-location spaces, or on-premises facilities.

Since the global pandemic of 2020, cloud technology has surged in popularity due to the level of data security it offers and the flexibility of working options it provides for all employees, notably remote workers.

Value proposition

Advocates of public and hybrid clouds claim that cloud computing allows companies to avoid or minimize up-front IT infrastructure costs. Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and that it enables IT teams to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable demand, providing burst computing capability: high computing power at certain periods of peak demand.

Additional value propositions of cloud computing include:

Cost reductions

A public-cloud delivery model converts capital expenditures (e.g., buying servers) to operational expenditure. This purportedly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third party and need not be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks. Pricing on a utility computing basis is "fine-grained", with usage-based billing options. As well, less in-house IT skills are required for implementation of projects that use cloud computing. The e-FISCAL project's state-of-the-art repository contains several articles looking into cost aspects in more detail, most of them concluding that costs savings depend on the type of activities supported and the type of infrastructure available in-house.

Device independence

Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they use (e.g., PC, mobile phone). As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect to it from anywhere.

Maintenance

Maintenance of cloud environment is easier because the data is hosted on an outside server maintained by a provider without the need to invest in data center hardware. IT maintenance of cloud computing is managed and updated by the cloud provider's IT maintenance team which reduces cloud computing costs compared with on-premises data centers.

Multitenancy

Multitenancy enables sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users thus allowing for:

centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)

peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer and pay for the resources and equipment to meet their highest possible load-levels)

utilization and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10-20% utilized.

Performance

Performance is monitored by IT experts from the service provider, and consistent and loosely coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.

Productivity

Productivity may be increased when multiple users can work on the same data simultaneously, rather than waiting for it to be saved and emailed. Time may be saved as information does not need to be re-entered when fields are matched, nor do users need to install application software upgrades to their computer.

Availability

Availability improves with the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes well-designed cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Scalability and Elasticity

Scalability and elasticity via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis in near real-time (Note, the VM startup time varies by VM type, location, OS and cloud providers), without users having to engineer for peak loads. This gives the ability to scale up when the usage need increases or down if resources are not being used. The time-efficient benefit of cloud scalability also means faster time to market, more business flexibility, and adaptability, as adding new resources does not take as much time as it used to. Emerging approaches for managing elasticity include the use of machine learning techniques to propose efficient elasticity models.

Security can improve due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than other traditional systems, in part because service providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford to tackle or which they lack the technical skills to address. However, the complexity of security is greatly increased when data is distributed over a wider area or over a greater number of devices, as well as in multi-tenant systems shared by unrelated users. In addition, user access to security audit logs may be difficult or impossible. Private cloud installations are in part motivated by users' desire to retain control over the infrastructure and avoid losing control of information security.

Challenges and limitations

One of the main challenges of cloud computing, in comparison to more traditional on-premises computing, is data security and privacy. Cloud users entrust their sensitive data to third-party providers, who may not have adequate measures to protect it from unauthorized access, breaches, or leaks. Cloud users also face compliance risks if they have to adhere to certain regulations or standards regarding data protection, such as GDPR or HIPAA.

Another challenge of cloud computing is reduced visibility and control. Cloud users may not have full insight into how their cloud resources are managed, configured, or optimized by their providers. They may also have limited ability to customize or modify their cloud services according to their specific needs or preferences. Complete understanding of all technology may be impossible, especially given the scale, complexity, and deliberate opacity of contemporary systems; however, there is a need for understanding complex technologies and their interconnections to have power and agency within them. The metaphor of the cloud can be seen as problematic as cloud computing retains the aura of something noumenal and numinous; it is something experienced without precisely understanding what it is or how it works.

In addition, cloud migration is a significant issue. Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications, or workloads from one cloud environment to another or from on-premises to the cloud. Cloud migration can be complex, time-consuming, and costly, especially if there are incompatibility issues between different cloud platforms or architectures. Cloud migration can also cause downtime, performance degradation, or data loss if not planned and executed properly.

Service models

Cloud computing service models arranged as layers in a stack

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) promotes the idea of "Everything as a Service" (EaaS or XaaS, or simply aAsS). This concept is operationalized in cloud computing through several service models as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The three standard service models are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). They are commonly depicted as layers in a stack, providing different levels of abstraction. However, these layers are not necessarily interdependent. For instance, SaaS can be delivered on bare metal, bypassing PaaS and IaaS, and a program can run directly on IaaS without being packaged as SaaS.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

"Infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) refers to online services that provide high-level APIs used to abstract various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup, etc. A hypervisor runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements. Linux containers run in isolated partitions of a single Linux kernel running directly on the physical hardware. Linux cgroups and namespaces are the underlying Linux kernel technologies used to isolate, secure and manage the containers. The use of containers offers higher performance than virtualization because there is no hypervisor overhead. IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk-image library, raw block storage, file or object storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles.

The NIST's definition of cloud computing describes IaaS as "where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls)."

IaaS-cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools of equipment installed in data centers. For wide-area connectivity, customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks). To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software. Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis: cost reflects the number of resources allocated and consumed.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

The NIST's definition of cloud computing defines Platform as a Service as:

The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.

PaaS vendors offer a development environment to application developers. The provider typically develops toolkit and standards for development and channels for distribution and payment. In the PaaS models, cloud providers deliver a computing platform, typically including an operating system, programming-language execution environment, database, and the web server. Application developers develop and run their software on a cloud platform instead of directly buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. With some PaaS, the underlying computer and storage resources scale automatically to match application demand so that the cloud user does not have to allocate resources manually.[need quotation to verify ]

Some integration and data management providers also use specialized applications of PaaS as delivery models for data. Examples include iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) and dPaaS (Data Platform as a Service). iPaaS enables customers to develop, execute and govern integration flows. Under the iPaaS integration model, customers drive the development and deployment of integrations without installing or managing any hardware or middleware. dPaaS delivers integration-and data-management-products as a fully managed service. Under the dPaaS model, the PaaS provider, not the customer, manages the development and execution of programs by building data applications for the customer. dPaaS users access data through data-visualization tools.

Software as a service (SaaS)

The NIST's definition of cloud computing defines Software as a Service as:

The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider's applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.

In the software as a service (SaaS) model, users gain access to application software and databases. Cloud providers manage the infrastructure and platforms that run the applications. SaaS is sometimes referred to as "on-demand software" and is usually priced on a pay-per-use basis or using a subscription fee. In the SaaS model, cloud providers install and operate application software in the cloud and cloud users access the software from cloud clients. Cloud users do not manage the cloud infrastructure and platform where the application runs. This eliminates the need to install and run the application on the cloud user's own computers, which simplifies maintenance and support. Cloud applications differ from other applications in their scalability-which can be achieved by cloning tasks onto multiple virtual machines at run-time to meet changing work demand. Load balancers distribute the work over the set of virtual machines. This process is transparent to the cloud user, who sees only a single access-point. To accommodate a large number of cloud users, cloud applications can be multitenant, meaning that any machine may serve more than one cloud-user organization.

The pricing model for SaaS applications is typically a monthly or yearly flat fee per user, so prices become scalable and adjustable if users are added or removed at any point. It may also be free. Proponents claim that SaaS gives a business the potential to reduce IT operational costs by outsourcing hardware and software maintenance and support to the cloud provider. This enables the business to reallocate IT operations costs away from hardware/software spending and from personnel expenses, towards meeting other goals. In addition, with applications hosted centrally, updates can be released without the need for users to install new software. One drawback of SaaS comes with storing the users' data on the cloud provider's server. As a result,[citation needed ] there could be unauthorized access to the data. Examples of applications offered as SaaS are games and productivity software like Google Docs and Office Online. SaaS applications may be integrated with cloud storage or File hosting services, which is the case with Google Docs being integrated with Google Drive, and Office Online being integrated with OneDrive.

Mobile "backend" as a service (MBaaS)

In the mobile "backend" as a service (m) model, also known as "backend as a service" (BaaS), web app and mobile app developers are provided with a way to link their applications to cloud storage and cloud computing services with application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed to their applications and custom software development kits (SDKs). Services include user management, push notifications, integration with social networking services and more. This is a relatively recent model in cloud computing, with most BaaS startups dating from 2011 or later but trends indicate that these services are gaining significant mainstream traction with enterprise consumers.

Serverless computing or Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)

Serverless computing is a cloud computing code execution model in which the cloud provider fully manages starting and stopping virtual machines as necessary to serve requests. Requests are billed by an abstract measure of the resources required to satisfy the request, rather than per virtual machine per hour. Despite the name, serverless computing does not actually involve running code without servers. The business or person using the system does not have to purchase, rent or provide servers or virtual machines for the back-end code to run on.

Function as a service (FaaS) is a service-hosted remote procedure call that utilizes serverless computing to enable deploying individual functions in the cloud to run in response to events. Some consider FaaS to fall under the umbrella of serverless computing, while others use the terms interchangeably.

Deployment models

Cloud computing types

Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third party, and hosted either internally or externally. Undertaking a private cloud project requires significant engagement to virtualize the business environment, and requires the organization to reevaluate decisions about existing resources. It can improve business, but every step in the project raises security issues that must be addressed to prevent serious vulnerabilities. Self-run data centers are generally capital intensive. They have a significant physical footprint, requiring allocations of space, hardware, and environmental controls. These assets have to be refreshed periodically, resulting in additional capital expenditures. They have attracted criticism because users "still have to buy, build, and manage them" and thus do not benefit from less hands-on management, essentially "[lacking] the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept".

Cloud services are considered "public" when they are delivered over the public Internet, and they may be offered as a paid subscription, or free of charge. Architecturally, there are few differences between public- and private-cloud services, but security concerns increase substantially when services (applications, storage, and other resources) are shared by multiple customers. Most public-cloud providers offer direct-connection services that allow customers to securely link their legacy data centers to their cloud-resident applications.

Several factors like the functionality of the solutions, cost, integrational and organizational aspects as well as safety & security are influencing the decision of enterprises and organizations to choose a public cloud or on-premises solution.

Hybrid cloud is a composition of a public cloud and a private environment, such as a private cloud or on-premises resources, that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect collocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources. Gartner defines a hybrid cloud service as a cloud computing service that is composed of some combination of private, public and community cloud services, from different service providers. A hybrid cloud service crosses isolation and provider boundaries so that it cannot be simply put in one category of private, public, or community cloud service. It allows one to extend either the capacity or the capability of a cloud service, by aggregation, integration or customization with another cloud service.

Varied use cases for hybrid cloud composition exist. For example, an organization may store sensitive client data in house on a private cloud application, but interconnect that application to a business intelligence application provided on a public cloud as a software service. This example of hybrid cloud extends the capabilities of the enterprise to deliver a specific business service through the addition of externally available public cloud services. Hybrid cloud adoption depends on a number of factors such as data security and compliance requirements, level of control needed over data, and the applications an organization uses.

Another example of hybrid cloud is one where IT organizations use public cloud computing resources to meet temporary capacity needs that can not be met by the private cloud. This capability enables hybrid clouds to employ cloud bursting for scaling across clouds. Cloud bursting is an application deployment model in which an application runs in a private cloud or data center and "bursts" to a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity increases. A primary advantage of cloud bursting and a hybrid cloud model is that an organization pays for extra compute resources only when they are needed. Cloud bursting enables data centers to create an in-house IT infrastructure that supports average workloads, and use cloud resources from public or private clouds, during spikes in processing demands.

Community cloud shares infrastructure between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns (security, compliance, jurisdiction, etc.), whether managed internally or by a third-party, and either hosted internally or externally. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud (but more than a private cloud), so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized.

Distributed

A cloud computing platform can be assembled from a distributed set of machines in different locations, connected to a single network or hub service. It is possible to distinguish between two types of distributed clouds: public-resource computing and volunteer cloud.

Public-resource computing - This type of distributed cloud results from an expansive definition of cloud computing, because they are more akin to distributed computing than cloud computing. Nonetheless, it is considered a sub-class of cloud computing.

Volunteer cloud - Volunteer cloud computing is characterized as the intersection of public-resource computing and cloud computing, where a cloud computing infrastructure is built using volunteered resources. Many challenges arise from this type of infrastructure, because of the volatility of the resources used to build it and the dynamic environment it operates in. It can also be called peer-to-peer clouds, or ad-hoc clouds. An interesting effort in such direction is Cloud@Home, it aims to implement a cloud computing infrastructure using volunteered resources providing a business-model to incentivize contributions through financial restitution.

Multicloud is the use of multiple cloud computing services in a single heterogeneous architecture to reduce reliance on single vendors, increase flexibility through choice, mitigate against disasters, etc. It differs from hybrid cloud in that it refers to multiple cloud services, rather than multiple deployment modes (public, private, legacy).

Poly cloud refers to the use of multiple public clouds for the purpose of leveraging specific services that each provider offers. It differs from Multi cloud in that it is not designed to increase flexibility or mitigate against failures but is rather used to allow an organization to achieve more that could be done with a single provider.

The issues of transferring large amounts of data to the cloud as well as data security once the data is in the cloud initially hampered adoption of cloud for big data, but now that much data originates in the cloud and with the advent of bare-metal servers, the cloud has become a solution for use cases including business analytics and geospatial analysis.

HPC cloud refers to the use of cloud computing services and infrastructure to execute high-performance computing (HPC) applications. These applications consume a considerable amount of computing power and memory and are traditionally executed on clusters of computers. In 2016 a handful of companies, including R-HPC, Amazon Web Services, Univa, Silicon Graphics International, Sabalcore, Gomput, and Penguin Computing offered a high-performance computing cloud. The Penguin On Demand (POD) cloud was one of the first non-virtualized remote HPC services offered on a pay-as-you-go basis. Penguin Computing launched its HPC cloud in 2016 as an alternative to Amazon's EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, which uses virtualized computing nodes.

Architecture

Cloud computing sample architecture

Cloud architecture, the systems architecture of the software systems involved in the delivery of cloud computing, typically involves multiple cloud components communicating with each other over a loose coupling mechanism such as a messaging queue. Elastic provision implies intelligence in the use of tight or loose coupling as applied to mechanisms such as these and others.

Cloud engineering

Cloud engineering is the application of engineering disciplines of cloud computing. It brings a systematic approach to the high-level concerns of commercialization, standardization and governance in conceiving, developing, operating and maintaining cloud computing systems. It is a multidisciplinary method encompassing contributions from diverse areas such as systems, software, web, performance, information technology engineering, security, platform, risk, and quality engineering.

Security and privacy

Cloud suppliers security and privacy agreements must be aligned to the demand(s) requirements and requlations.

Cloud computing poses privacy concerns because the service provider can access the data that is in the cloud at any time. It could accidentally or deliberately alter or delete information. Many cloud providers can share information with third parties if necessary for purposes of law and order without a warrant. That is permitted in their privacy policies, which users must agree to before they start using cloud services. Solutions to privacy include policy and legislation as well as end-users' choices for how data is stored. Users can encrypt data that is processed or stored within the cloud to prevent unauthorized access. Identity management systems can also provide practical solutions to privacy concerns in cloud computing. These systems distinguish between authorized and unauthorized users and determine the amount of data that is accessible to each entity. The systems work by creating and describing identities, recording activities, and getting rid of unused identities.

According to the Cloud Security Alliance, the top three threats in the cloud are Insecure Interfaces and APIs, Data Loss & Leakage, and Hardware Failure-which accounted for 29%, 25% and 10% of all cloud security outages respectively. Together, these form shared technology vulnerabilities. In a cloud provider platform being shared by different users, there may be a possibility that information belonging to different customers resides on the same data server. Additionally, Eugene Schultz, chief technology officer at Emagined Security, said that hackers are spending substantial time and effort looking for ways to penetrate the cloud. "There are some real Achilles' heels in the cloud infrastructure that are making big holes for the bad guys to get into". Because data from hundreds or thousands of companies can be stored on large cloud servers, hackers can theoretically gain control of huge stores of information through a single attack-a process he called "hyperjacking". Some examples of this include the Dropbox security breach, and iCloud 2014 leak. Dropbox had been breached in October 2014, having over 7 million of its users passwords stolen by hackers in an effort to get monetary value from it by Bitcoins (BTC). By having these passwords, they are able to read private data as well as have this data be indexed by search engines (making the information public).

There is the problem of legal ownership of the data (If a user stores some data in the cloud, can the cloud provider profit from it?). Many Terms of Service agreements are silent on the question of ownership. Physical control of the computer equipment (private cloud) is more secure than having the equipment off-site and under someone else's control (public cloud). This delivers great incentive to public cloud computing service providers to prioritize building and maintaining strong management of secure services. Some small businesses that do not have expertise in IT security could find that it is more secure for them to use a public cloud. There is the risk that end users do not understand the issues involved when signing on to a cloud service (persons sometimes do not read the many pages of the terms of service agreement, and just click "Accept" without reading). This is important now that cloud computing is common and required for some services to work, for example for an intelligent personal assistant (Apple's Siri or Google Assistant). Fundamentally, private cloud is seen as more secure with higher levels of control for the owner, however public cloud is seen to be more flexible and requires less time and money investment from the user.

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), global spending on cloud computing services has reached $706 billion and expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025. While Gartner estimated that global public cloud services end-user spending would reach $600 billion by 2023. As per a McKinsey & Company report, cloud cost-optimization levers and value-oriented business use cases foresee more than $1 trillion in run-rate EBITDA across Fortune 500 companies as up for grabs in 2030. In 2022, more than $1.3 trillion in enterprise IT spending was at stake from the shift to the cloud, growing to almost $1.8 trillion in 2025, according to Gartner.

Similar concepts

The goal of cloud computing is to allow users to take benefit from all of these technologies, without the need for deep knowledge about or expertise with each one of them. The cloud aims to cut costs and helps the users focus on their core business instead of being impeded by IT obstacles. The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Virtualization software separates a physical computing device into one or more "virtual" devices, each of which can be easily used and managed to perform computing tasks. With operating system-level virtualization essentially creating a scalable system of multiple independent computing devices, idle computing resources can be allocated and used more efficiently. Virtualization provides the agility required to speed up IT operations and reduces cost by increasing infrastructure utilization. Autonomic computing automates the process through which the user can provision resources on-demand. By minimizing user involvement, automation speeds up the process, reduces labor costs and reduces the possibility of human errors.

Cloud computing uses concepts from utility computing to provide metrics for the services used. Cloud computing attempts to address QoS (quality of service) and reliability problems of other grid computing models.

Cloud computing shares characteristics with:

Client-server model - Client-server computing refers broadly to any distributed application that distinguishes between service providers (servers) and service requestors (clients).

Computer bureau - A service bureau providing computer services, particularly from the 1960s to 1980s.

Grid computing - A form of distributed and parallel computing, whereby a 'super and virtual computer' is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely coupled computers acting in concert to perform very large tasks.

Fog computing - Distributed computing paradigm that provides data, compute, storage and application services closer to the client or near-user edge devices, such as network routers. Furthermore, fog computing handles data at the network level, on smart devices and on the end-user client-side (e.g. mobile devices), instead of sending data to a remote location for processing.

Utility computing - The "packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility, such as electricity."

Peer-to-peer - A distributed architecture without the need for central coordination. Participants are both suppliers and consumers of resources (in contrast to the traditional client-server model).

Cloud sandbox - A live, isolated computer environment in which a program, code or file can run without affecting the application in which it runs.

References

Further reading

Millard, Christopher (2013). Cloud Computing Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-967168-7.

Weisser, Alexander (2020). International Taxation of Cloud Computing. Editions Juridiques Libres, ISBN 978-2-88954-030-3.

Singh, Jatinder; Powles, Julia; Pasquier, Thomas; Bacon, Jean (July 2015). "Data Flow Management and Compliance in Cloud Computing". IEEE Cloud Computing. 2 (4): 24-32. doi:10.1109/MCC.2015.69. S2CID 9812531.

Armbrust, Michael; Stoica, Ion; Zaharia, Matei; Fox, Armando; Griffith, Rean; Joseph, Anthony D.; Katz, Randy; Konwinski, Andy; Lee, Gunho; Patterson, David; Rabkin, Ariel (1 April 2010). "A view of cloud computing". Communications of the ACM. 53 (4): 50. doi:10.1145/1721654.1721672. S2CID 1673644.

Hu, Tung-Hui (2015). A Prehistory of the Cloud. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-02951-3.

Mell, P. (2011, September). The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing. Retrieved November 1, 2015, from National Institute of Standards and Technology website

External links

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Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center.

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Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game remotely from a cloud. It contrasts with traditional means of gaming, wherein a game runs locally on a user's video game console, personal computer, or mobile device.

Cloud gaming platforms operate in a similar manner to remote desktops and video on demand services; games are stored and executed remotely on a provider's dedicated hardware, and streamed as video to a player's device via client software. The client software handles the player's inputs, which are sent back to the server and executed in-game. Some cloud gaming services are based on access to a virtualized Windows environment, allowing users to download and install games and software as they normally would on a local computer.

Cloud gaming can be advantageous as it eliminates the need to purchase expensive computer hardware or install games directly onto a local game system. Cloud gaming can be made available on a wide range of computing devices, including mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, digital media players, or proprietary thin client-like devices. Some services may offer additional features to take advantage of this model, including the ability for a viewer to join a player's session and temporarily take control of the game.

Due to their dependency on high-quality streaming video, cloud gaming services typically require reliable, high-speed internet connections with low latency. Even with high-speed connections available, traffic congestion and other issues affecting network latency can affect the performance of cloud gaming, and the ability to use a service regularly may also be limited by data caps enforced by some internet service providers.

Further, the costs of cloud gaming shift from traditional distribution through retail outlets and digital storefronts to the data servers that run the cloud gaming services. Novel cost structures are required to cover these operating costs compared to traditional distribution.

Cloud gaming requires significant infrastructure for the services to work as intended, including data centers and server farms for running the games, and high-bandwidth internet connections with low latency for delivering the streams to users. The network infrastructure required to make cloud gaming feasible was, for many years, not available in most geographic areas, or unavailable to consumer markets.

A major factor in the quality of a cloud gaming service is latency, as the amount of delay between the user's inputs and when they take effect can affect gameplay - especially in fast-paced games dependent on precise inputs (such as first-person shooters and fighting games). Attempts to reduce latency include the use of caching as the cached data can be "stored locally ... and can be retrieved when required."

The provider's dedicated hardware can be upgraded over time in order to support higher resolutions and frame rates for the rendering and streams. The Quality of Experience (QoE) that measures the user's general level of satisfaction also needs to be brought into consideration during the development phase of cloud gaming.

The first demonstrated approach of cloud gaming technology was by startup G-cluster (short for Game Cluster), which introduced its product at the 2000 E3, and released around 2003. In their initial model around 2005, G-cluster provided PC games that ran on their servers, using video-on-demand service providers, set-top box manufacturers, and middleware software providers to help provide their service to network operators, and then offered the games through portals to end users. By 2010, due to changes in the market, G-cluster changed their model to work through a large server manufacturer to provide their games to the network operators and directly to users. This refocusing was necessitated by the increased available of free-to-play games available for personal computers, drawing them away from G-cluster's service, so G-cluster opted to focus on Internet Protocol television (IPTV) users instead, which had a potential target of about three million users in 2010. French telco SFR launched G-cluster gaming service in 2010 for its end users and Orange followed suit in 2012 offering the gaming service for its customers. Both services have been commercially operational ever since offering cloud gaming for their customers on TV and mobile.

In early 2003, another attempt was announced by American company Infinium Labs, which intended to revolutionize the market of home entertainment with their Phantom video game console, a device that was envisioned to be capable of providing an on-demand video game delivery service via monthly online subscription. The Phantom was designed to run PC games, thus making it compatible with hundreds of titles from the start, and was to be sold at a much lower price than high-end PC gaming rigs. A functioning prototype was first presented at the E3 2004, running Unreal Tournament 2004, and then again at QuakeCon, where it was shown to be capable of perfectly operating Quake 3 Arena on a dedicated server. After a couple years of setbacks, the company bankrupted in 2008, with the Phantom console never officially released to the market, becoming one of the most popular vaporware of recent times.

Video game developer Crytek began the research on a cloud gaming system in 2005 for Crysis, but according to their CEO Cevat Yerli, they halted development in 2007 to wait until the infrastructure and cable Internet providers were able to complete the task and the cost of bandwidth to decline.

Entrepreneur Steve Perlman revealed OnLive at the March 2009 Game Developers Conference. Perlman stated that with improvements in data and video compression as well as capabilities of smartphones, the potential for cloud gaming was now timely. OnLive was officially launched in June 2010, alongside sale of its OnLive microconsole. While OnLive had acquired some support from large publishers like Ubisoft, 2K Games and THQ, they found it difficult to get other publishers onboard as they were wary of the subscription price model.

Simultaneous to OnLive, another startup Gaikai was announced by David Perry in 2010. Gaikai opted to approach streaming of game demos rather than full games, making the service a form of online advertising for games. Gaikai gained far more publisher support, including Electronic Arts which OnLive had been trying to bring back to their service. Gaikai was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in July 2012 for $340 million, and by October 2012, was offering PlayStation games. Ultimately, the technology behind Gaikai was used as the foundation for PlayStation Now, first introduced in 2014.

OnLive was never profitable, and after a possible acquisition by HP Inc. fell through, OnLive's assets were acquired by a newly formed entity named "OL2," which was capitalized by Gary Lauder of Lauder Partners in 2012 at $4.8 million, a fraction of OnLive's valuation from 2010. A mass layoff (2/3 of staff) was conducted to reduce operating costs. Under Lauder Partners, the new OL2 attempted to pivot its business model to allow streaming of games already owned by the user, but this failed to be profitable. OnLive and OL2's intellectual property was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in April 2015, but then closed it down about a month later. As stated by , the acquisition of both Gaikai and OnLive's intellectual property gave Sony access to a range of patents covering cloud gaming.

Nvidia first announced its cloud gaming service, Nvidia Grid (later rebranded as GeForce Now), as a combination of hardware using its graphics processing units and software in May 2012, initially intending to partner with Gaikai for games on the service. Ubitus GameCloud was also introduced alongside Nvidia's Grid. GameCloud was designed as white-label service based on Nvidia's Grid that other providers could use to offer game streaming to their customers.

Grid was formally introduced as part of its Nvidia Shield Android TV device during the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show. Grid/GeForce Now launched with services provided by several cloud gaming partners including Agawi, Cloudunion, Cyber Cloud, G-cluster, Playcast, and Ubitus. The Grid service was first launched in North America in November 2014 where a limited number of games were made available, and then later expanded to computers in 2017, including support for importing a user's Steam and Epic Games Store library to run on the remote instance. This importing model was criticized by publishers including Activision Blizzard and Bethesda Softworks, as purchases were only intended for personal computers and not through cloud gaming. The publishers forced NVidia to pull these games from their service.

In 2014, Dragon Quest X was brought to Nintendo 3DS in Japan using Ubitus for the streaming technology.

In 2017, the French startup Blade launched a service known as Shadow, where users are able to rent a remote Windows 10 instance on a datacenter, with allocated access to an Intel Xeon processor and Nvidia Quadro graphics. The service is geographically-limited based on proximity to one of its datacenters; it initially launched in France, but began expanding into the United States in 2019.

In May 2018, Electronic Arts acquired cloud gaming assets and talent from GameFly for an undisclosed amount. EA subsequently announced "Project Atlas", a project to explore the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Frostbite engine technology to create a "unified" platform to "remotely process and stream blockbuster, multiplayer HD games with the lowest possible latency, and also to unlock even more possibilities for dynamic social and cross-platform play." That month, Google and Microsoft also announced cloud gaming initiatives, with Google beginning to pilot "Project Stream" (including a closed beta featuring Assassin's Creed Odyssey running via a client in the Google Chrome web browser, and Microsoft announced the upcoming Project xCloud, leveraging Microsoft Azure technology.

At the Game Developers Conference in 2019, Google officially announced its cloud gaming service Stadia, which officially launched on November 19 of that year. In May, Sony announced a partnership with Microsoft to co-develop cloud solutions between divisions, including gaming.

Apple Inc., which makes the iOS platform for iPhones and iPads, had looked to block cloud gaming apps on its service in mid-2020. They argued that cloud gaming services allowed developers to add games onto the iOS system that bypassed the normal checks they perform on any app before it is added to the App Store, and thus violated their terms of service. However, in September 2020, Apple altered its rules that allowed cloud gaming apps to work on iOS, with restrictions that each game must be offered as an individual download on the iOS store which the user must use before playing, though catalog apps as part of the service can list and link to these games. Both GeForce Now and Stadia announced plans in November 2020 to release iOS versions of their streaming services as progressive web applications that would be run through a Chrome or Safari browser on iOS devices, as allowed for by Apple, to support cloud gaming. Microsoft has also announced plans to use a similar approach to bring the xCloud game streaming technology to iOS via the browser sometime in early 2021.

Amazon introduced its own cloud gaming service Luna in September 2020. Games on the service will be offered via a channel-style subscription service, with Amazon's own games and those from Ubisoft available at the service's launch.

Asus and Intel announced ongoing hardware supply, research & development and software optimization alongside Boosteroid cloud gaming platform in November 2020.

Nintendo currently has games on Nintendo Switch that primarily run on cloud gaming such as , , Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Kingdom Hearts franchise.

A proposed method to improve game streaming's scalability is adaptive graphics processing unit (GPU) resource scheduling. Most cloud gaming providers are using dedicated GPUs to each person playing a game. This leads to the best performance but can waste resources. With better GPU resource scheduling algorithms, if the game does not fully utilize that GPU it can be used to help run someone else's game simultaneously. In the past, "GPU virtualization was not used due to the inferior performance of the resource scheduling algorithm". However new resource management algorithms have been developed that can allow up to 90% of the GPUs original power to be utilized even while being split among many users.

Algorithms could be used to help predict a player's next inputs, which could overcome the impact of latency in cloud gaming applications. Stadia's head of engineering Majd Bakar foresaw the future possibility of using such a concept to "[reduce] latency to the point where it's basically nonexistent", referring to this concept as "negative latency".

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Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game remotely from a cloud.

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In the video game industry, games as a service ( GaaS) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model, similar to software as a service. Games as a service are ways to monetize video games either after their initial sale, or to support a free-to-play model. Games released under the GaaS model typically receive a long or indefinite stream of monetized new content over time to encourage players to continue paying to support the game. This often leads to games that work under a GaaS model to be called " living games", " live games", or " live service games" since they continually change with these updates.

The idea of games as a service began with the introduction of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft, where the game's subscription model approach assured continued revenues to the developer and publisher to create new content. Over time, new forms of offering continued GaaS revenues have come about. A significant impact on the use of GaaS was the expansion of mobile gaming which often include a social element, such as playing or competing with friends, and with players wanting to buy into GaaS to continue to play with friends.

Chinese publisher Tencent was one of the first companies to jump onto this around 2007 and 2008, establishing several different ways to monetize their products as a service to Chinese players which typically play on phone or at internet cafés rather than on consoles or computers, and since has become the world's largest video game publisher in terms of revenue. Another influential game establishing games as a service was Team Fortress 2. To fight against a shrinking player-base, Valve released the first of several free updates in 2008, the "Gold Rush Update" which featured new weapons and cosmetic skins that could be unlocked through in-game achievements. Further updates added similar weapons which starting include monetization options, such as buying virtual keys to open in-game loot boxes. Valve began earning enough from these revenues to transition Team Fortress 2 to a free-to-play title. Valve carried this principle over to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and to , the latter which was in competition with League of Legends by Riot Games. League of Legends, which had already had a microtransaction model in place, established a constant push of new content on a more frequent basis (in this case, the release of a new hero each week for several years straight) to compete, creating the concept of lifestyle games such as and Tom Clancy's The Division.

Some examples include:

Game subscriptions

Many massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) use monthly subscription models. Revenue from these subscriptions pay for the computer servers used to run the game, the people that manage and oversee the game on a daily basis, and the introduction of new content into the game. Several MMOs offer an initial trial period that allow players to try the game for a limited amount of time, or until their character reaches an experience level cap, after which they are required to pay to continue to play.

Game subscription services

Subscription services like EA Play and Xbox Game Pass grant subscribers complete access to a large library of games offered digitally with no limitations. Users need to download these games to their local computer or console to play. However, users must remain subscribed to play these games; the games are protected by digital rights management that requires an active account to play. New games are typically added to the service, and in some cases, games may leave the service, after which subscribers will be unable to play that title. Such services may offer the ability to purchase these titles to own and allow them to play outside of the subscription service.

Cloud gaming / gaming on demand

Services like PlayStation Now, Stadia or GameFly allow players to play games that are run on remote servers on local devices, eliminating the need for specialized console hardware or powerful personal computers, outside of the necessary bandwidth for Internet connectivity. These otherwise operate similar to game services, in that the library of available titles may be added to or removed from over time, depending on the service.

Microtransactions

Microtransactions represent low-cost purchases, compared to the cost of a full game or a large expansion pack, that provide some form of additional content to the purchaser. The type of content can vary from additional downloadable content; new maps and levels for multiplayer games; new items, weapons, vehicles, clothing, or other gear for the player's character; power-ups and temporary buffs; in-game currency, and elements like loot boxes that provide a random assortment of items and rewards. Players do not necessarily need to purchase these items with real-world funds to acquire them. However, a game's design and financial approach that aims to provide ongoing service is aimed to assure that a small fraction of players will purchase this content immediately rather than grinding through the game for a long time to obtain it. These select "whales" providing sufficient revenue to support further development of new content. This approach is generally how free-to-play games like Puzzle & Dragons, Candy Crush Saga, and League of Legends support their ongoing development, as well as used atop full-priced games like Grand Theft Auto Online.

Season passes

Games with season passes provide one or more large content updates over the course of about a year, or a "season" in these terms. Players must buy into a season pass to access this new content; the game remains playable if players do not purchase the season pass and do gain benefit of core improvements to the game, but they are unable to access new maps, weapons, quests, game modes, or other gameplay elements without this content. Games like and its sequel and use this season pass approach. A related concept is the battle pass which provides new customization options that a player can earn by completing challenges in a game, but only if they have bought into the battle pass; content on a battle pass is typically only obtainable during a limited time. Battle passes can be seen in games such as , Rocket League, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Fortnite Battle Royale.

Blockchain game

Games which use technology based on blockchain strategies, which can include cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). In contrast to microtransactions in which players can buy but not usually capable of trading items with other players, blockchain games encourage players to create value with blockchain items and trade and sell these, with the developer or publisher taking a small fee on each transaction. As blockchain items assure a singular owner, this can lead to high-selling items due to speculative buyers. As of 2021, blockchain games have yet to catch on due to the stigmas associated with cryptocurrency and NFTs but major publishers have expressed interest in exploring blockchain features. Some notable blockchain games include CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity.

Games may combine one or more of these forms. A common example are lifestyle games, which provide rotating daily content, which frequently reward the player with in-game currency to buy new equipment (otherwise purchasable with real-world funds), and extended by updates to the overall game. Examples of such lifestyle games include , , and many MMORPGs like World of Warcraft.

The principal reason that many developers and publishers have adopted GaaS is financial, giving them the ability to capture more revenue from the market than with a single release title (otherwise known as "games as a product"). While not all players will be willing to spend additional money to gain new content, there can be enough demand from a smaller population of players to support the service model. For example, for World of Warcraft, it was estimated on the basis of average revenue per user (ARPU), that only 5% of the game's population paid 20 times more than the baseline ARPU, sufficient to continue ongoing development of the game. GaaS further represents a means by which games can improve their reputation to critics and players by continued improvements over time, using revenues earned from GaaS monetization to support the continued development and to draw in new sales for the product. Titles like and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege are examples of games offering GaaS which initially launched with lukewarm reception but have been improved with continued service improvements.

Games as a service also impacts the development process for games. When developing a game as a product, there is generally a linear flow of tasks to assure that the product shipped is free of software bugs and other problems that may exist, which can be both time consuming and costly to test for. If there are critical bugs found post-release, this can also be costly to develop, test, and distribute software updates to rectify. In developing games as a service, where consumer expectation is already set to expect continual updates to the game, the rigor on software testing in the early stages of release may be forgone as to get the title out to players faster, accepting that software bugs may be present but will be fixed when the next update is released. Further, games developed as a service are more commonly driven by player feedback, so initial iterations of a game's release may be lightweight to be used as a foundation to build upon based on the game's community. This can further shorten the initial development cycle of a game. However, games as a service also increased overall development effort as there are usually two or more concurrent tracks to support a game; one working to support the current available release, and others that are working on the future content that will be added to the game.

While the games as a service model is aimed to extend revenues, the model also aimed to eliminate legal issues related to software licenses, specifically the concept of software ownership versus license. Case law for video games remains unclear whether retail and physical game products qualify as goods or services. If treated as goods, the purchaser gains several rights, in particular those related to the first-sale doctrine which allows them to resell or trade these games, which can subsequently affect sales revenue to publishers. The industry has generally considered that physical games are a service, enforced through End-user license agreements (EULA)s to try to limit post-sale activities, but these have generally not been enforceable since they affect consumers' rights, leading to confusion in the area. Instead, by transitioning to games as a service, where there is a clear service being offered, publishers and developers can clearly establish their works as services rather than goods. This further gives publishers more control over the use of the software and what actions users can do through an enforceable EULA, such as preventing class action lawsuits.

GaaS can reduce unauthorized copying. Certain games can also be hosted in a cloud server, eliminating the need for installation in players' computers and consoles.

Industry analysis firm Digital River estimated that by 2016[needs update ], 25% of the revenue of games on personal computers results from one form or another of GaaS. The firm argued that this reflects on consumers that want more out of games that are otherwise offered at full price (US$60 at the time of the report) or will look for discounts, thus making the market ripe for post-release monetization. Several major publishers, including Square Enix, Ubisoft, and Electronic Arts have identified GaaS as a significant focus of their product lines in 2017, while others like Activision Blizzard and Take-Two Interactive recognize the importance of post-release support of a game to their financial bottom lines. GaaS is also seen as a developing avenue for indie video games, which frequently have a wider potential install base (across computer, consoles, and mobile devices) that they can draw service revenues from.

A study by DFC Intelligence in 2018 found Electronic Arts' value rose from US$4 billion to $33 billion since 2012, while Activision Blizzard saw its value rise from $20 billion to $60 billion in the same period, with both increases attributed in part to the use of the GaaS model in their games catalog. Electronic Arts had earned $2 billion from GaaS transactions in 2018.

Stella Chung, writing for IGN and using MultiVersus as an example, criticized the lack of access when live service games go offline, especially for those who invest money in it. She also pointed out the oversaturation of the market with free-to-play live service games, and that that many live service games struggle, leading to them shutting down.

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In the video game industry, games as a service ( GaaS) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model, similar to software as a service. Games as a service are ways to monetize video games either after their initial sale, or to support a free-to-play model.

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ISV and Custom Applications

ISV and Custom Applications

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers secure, scalable, and reliable cloud services to host any custom-built or ISV application.

Operate your IT predictably, securely, and at a lower cost with cloud infrastructure services designed to run all your cloud native, web-scale, and mission-critical workloads.

Explore OCI

Developer Services

Build, deploy, and manage modern cloud applications using developer-friendly tools and services.

Integration Services

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integration services connect any application and data source to automate end-to-end processes and centralize management. The broad array of integrations, with prebuilt adapters and low-code customization, simplify migration to the cloud while streamlining hybrid and multicloud operations.

API full lifecycle management

Big Data and Data Lake

Gain new insights across all of your data with our comprehensive platform of managed Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, and Kafka-compatible services, combined with best-in-class data warehouse and data management services.

Open Source Databases

MySQL HeatWave is a fully managed database service, powered by the integrated HeatWave in-memory query accelerator. It's the only cloud database service that combines transactions, analytics, and machine learning services in one MySQL Database, delivering real-time, secure analytics without the complexity, latency, and cost of ETL duplication.

Security, Observability and Management, Compliance, and Cost Management and Governance

Security, Observability and Management, Compliance, and Cost Management and Governance

Protect your most valuable data in the cloud with Oracle's security-first approach and comprehensive compliance programs. Oracle provides visibility and machine-learning-driven insights to ease management across all layers of the stack deployed on any technology, anywhere.

Cloud Infrastructure Security

Observability and Management

Cost Management and Governance

Learn why more than 400,000 customers trust Oracle

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Oracle | Cloud Applications and Cloud Platform

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Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications and cloud platform services.

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Cloud Computing Services | Microsoft Azure

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Invent with purpose, realize cost savings, and make your organization more efficient with Microsoft Azure’s open and flexible cloud computing platform.