The Coalition Transforms Azure VMs “IncrediBuild absolutely impacts our ability to iterate and move forward. We couldn’t do anything without it.” into a 700-Core IncrediBuild “Virtual Joe Vogt, IT Manager, The Coalition Studio Supercomputer” and Releases Two AAA Games in One Year Microsoft’s The Coalition Studios has made its way into the forefront of AAA gaming through its development of one of the top first person shooter brands: Gears of War. The Coalition was eager to deliver new games to excited fans, but development was slowed by excessive wait times for shader and code compilation of the intricate levels, characters and vehicles. Adding to this, the third-party companies working alongside The Coalition often lacked the computing power necessary to effectively compile the shaders and codes. To overcome these internal and external challenges, The Coalition developers utilized IncrediBuild’s unique process level virtualization technology to scale Azure performance capabilities far above that of a single Azure Virtual Machine. Without adding any on-premesis equipment, The Coalition was ultimately able to deploy 700 cores, significantly reducing shader and code compilation times for themselves and their partners. Business Challenge partners to provide the studio with With the release of both Gears augmented production capacity, “Without Incredibuild, our of War: Ultimate Edition, a high- some of these partners were development would grind to a definition remake of the first game smaller organizations that lacked halt.“ the machines necessary to compile in the iconic series, and later Gears Joe Vogt of War 4, the next chapter in the first shaders and effectively utilize UE4. IT Manager person shooter saga, 2016 proved This situation left these partners in The Coalition Studio to be an amazing year for Gears fans need of a solution. everywhere. To meet these incredible Additionally, in the final six-month- milestones, The Coalition Studio Solution crunch prior to game release, The developers needed to overcome As a first party studio inside of Coalition was able to deploy a large both internal and external production Microsoft, The Coalition Studio is Azure-based IncrediBuild farm with barriers. able to use and benefit from the connectivity provided by Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Azure ExpressRoute circuits. This Internally, frequent and massive use Microsoft Azure provided The allowed the Azure based agents to of Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) presented Coalition Studio with an easy and appear “local” to The Coalition’s significant challenges, as told by The effective way to deploy hundreds existing production coordinator. Coalition’s IT Manager, Joe Vogt. of dedicated CPU cores to be Without adding any on-premesis “We use Epic’s Unreal Editor 4 as a used for accelerating local shader equipment, 700 cores were deployed primary tool for content creation compilations. in this fashion and used throughout such as levels, characters and the final production push for Gears vehicles...The editor needs to compile The Coalition Studio then used of War 4. The result was a significant all shaders beforehand, opening a IncrediBuild’s unique process level reduction of both shader and code level can take up to 30 minutes in virtualization technology to scale compilation times. some situations.” With more than Azure performance beyond the 100 team members using UE4 on a capabilities of a single Azure Virtual According to Vogt, “IncrediBuild daily basis, a solution was needed to Machine. The Coalition deployed absolutely impacts our ability to accelerate the shader compilation dozens of 64-core Azure Virtual iterate and move forward. Our times. “You start doing the math and Machines (VMs) running IncrediBuild. iterative cycle includes creating a find out that with 30 minutes just to By harnessing the power of Azure build of the game, playing it, finding open a level, four to five times a day, VMs, IncrediBuild creates an “on the bugs, reporting the bugs, killing you can spend a third of your day fly” virtual environment where all those bugs and then producing yet doing nothing,” said Vogt. those cores are working together another build , sometimes two times for a single process execution. In a day. Rinse and repeat. It’s all about In addition to their internal issues, this way, the platform was able how fast can a user get the latest The Coalition was also faced by to be scaled to meet the large version of all the data and get back external challenges. While The process execution requirements and to work. Without IncrediBuild, our Coalition had the assistance of seamlessly accelerate UE4 shader development would grind to a halt.” several third party outsourcing compilation and level loading times. Overview Customer Profile Customer: The Coalition Studio Microsoft’s The Coalition Studio has chain-sawed its way into the forefront of AAA gaming. As its name Customer Website: http://thecoalitionstudio.com implies, The Coalition is dedicated solely to developing, supporting and innovating one of the top first Country or Region: Canada person shooter brands, Gears of War, after Microsoft bought the franchise from another IncrediBuild Industry: Game Development customer, Epic Games. Located in scenic Vancouver BC, the studio’s 200 employees have worked hard to immerse millions of gamers in the post-apocalyptic planet Sera with the record-breaking Gears series on the Xbox One and Windows 10 platforms. To address the processing challenges tasks that are part of developing a of their third party partners, The game, The Collation enjoyed Azure “IncrediBuild adds yet another Coalition outsourced Azure and consumed services through hybrid layer of scalability to Visual IncrediBuild resources for a short cloud bursts. This allowed them to Studio, enabling developers to but crucial boost. “In one instance,” utilize Azure to boost IncrediBuild scale their applications to the recalled Vogt, “the partner was for the limited time that the boost cloud.” unable to provide any dedicated was needed, rather than buying Mitra Azizirad IncrediBuild farm capacity onsite, expensive hardware that would GM. Cloud Application Development & which caused huge waits for users outlast its usefulness. Data when opening massive Gears of War Microsoft 4 levels in UE4.” Benefits The Coalition seemed to do the Regardless of the partner’s initial impossible by releasing two AAA • Overcoming limited partner resource limitations, by utilizing the games in one year. They were able to resources. Through their flexible nature of Azure consumed accomplish this in part by: allocation of IncrediBuild services and IncrediBuild’s parallel operated Azure cores The computing tech, The Coalition was • Scaling for maximum Coalition was able to boost able to grant their partners the acceleration. By harnessing the computing abilities of their power to scale their performance and IncrediBuild’s power The under-powered third-party enjoy unparalleled acceleration. Coalition was able to create a partners. 700 core Azure virtual super- “We deployed around 160 cores to a computer, well beyond the • Utilizing real-time scaling for public-facing Azure datacenter and limitation of Azure’s most both internal and external needs. configured a site-to-site VPN with powerful single VM. With this capability, The Coalition the partner location.” Vogt explained, was able to increase computing “This allowed the small number of • Dramatically cutting shader and capabilities during crunch time local Unreal Engine users to benefit code build times through the and scale back once the product from the IncrediBuild farm capacity in unified use of IncrediBuild and was launched, without lasting, Azure to accelerate their work.” Azure. This transformed UE4 unnecessary hardware. level load times and enabled Since this was a short-term production staff to keep working engagement, like many other micro- instead of waiting. Partner Overview Partner Profile Partner: IncrediBuild For more than 15 years, IncrediBuild has been the leading development acceleration solution. The Partner Website: www.incredibuild.com award-winning plug-and-play solution runs on customers’ existing hardware and dramatically speeds Country or Region: Isreal up builds, testing, packaging and more by up to 30x, by distributing tasks on machines across the local network. IncrediBuild empowers over 100,000 users from more than 2,000 leading companies to reach a fast time to market, save hundreds of developer hours and cut back on HPC costs. The company’s strong partnership with Microsoft resulted in IncrediBuild’s integration into Visual Studio. Software • Visual Studio • Azure • IncrediBuild This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published JANUARY 2017..