2023.11.28 Media

Magazine Software Design December 2023 : Interview “Efforts to improve ‘Livly Island’ post-reboot”with Shingo Inoue and Yuma Takafuji [ Part 2 ]

※This article is machine translated.

It first appeared in a Japanese magazine, and after Cocone received permission, it was translated into English and published.
first appearance: Software Design December 2023 ( Gijutsu-Hyoron Co., Ltd. )

Explore Cocone’s engineering capabilities to open up a new era of Web3

Top-level performance in the world’s favorite digital world

Part 6: Efforts to Improve “Livly Island” After the Reboot

Livly Island, a popular pet-raising app created in 2003, was once closed in 2019, but Cocone acquired the rights and will reboot (re-launch) it as a smartphone app in July 2021. The popularity of the app exceeded expectations, with 300,000 downloads in the first month after its release, and the team was even forced to take measures to deal with the server load. In this interview, we ask Shingo Inoue and Yuma Takafuji of the Cocone Livly Project about their post-release improvement efforts.

– Please introduce yourself.

Shingo Inoue (Inoue): My name is Shingo Inoue, Cocone Livly Project. I am mainly in charge of client development. My favorite Livly is TOBINE.

Yuma Takafuji (Yuma Takafuji): My name is Yuma Takafuji, also from Livly Project. I am mainly in charge of server development and operation. My favorite Livly is PYGMY.

Database moved to fully managed service

– Could you briefly tell us about “Livly Island”?

Inoue: Customers can create their own healing space by having their own alter egos, Hom and Livly, live on their “island”. The maximum number of Livly that can be displayed on the screen is three. The color of Lively’s and Homme’s hair changes depending on the color of the food (insects) you give them, and items obtained through gacha can be used to change Homme’s clothes and decorate the island.

Takafuji: If you do not take good care of Livly, such as feeding and showering, she may wander away from the island. Please raise her with affection (laugh). You can also enjoy communicating with your friends by visiting their islands.

– I understand that immediately after the release, the load was greater than expected and you were forced to take countermeasures.

Takafuji: I have experienced several app launches in the past, but “Livly Island” was the first time that the load greatly exceeded our prior forecast. First, we changed the Amazon EC2 instance running the database (MongoDB) to a more powerful one. With the help of the infrastructure team, we were able to scale up the primary and secondary in sequence, which we successfully accomplished and got through without any downtime.

– What improvements have you been working on since then?

Takafuji: In addition to tuning improvements to the database-related code and heavy queries, we switched from MongoDB running on EC2 to MongoDB Atlas, a fully managed service (Figure 1). Although the cost is higher, the rich visualization of performance on the management screen and the convenience of the Performance Advisor functionality are truly the benefits of a fully managed service.

Inoue: Since the operation status is displayed graphically, it is easy to see how many reads and writes are running, how many collections are being accessed, and so on.

Takafuji: There are also other features that give advice on how to improve performance, such as ” you should put an index here”. Livly Island is very valuable because of its heavy load.

Inoue: It’s also great to be free from retiring EC2 instances.

Takafuji: Yes. At the time, the instance retirement notification from AWS was the last email I wanted to see. Basically, you have to stop the target instance and then start it up. With fully managed service, you are free from such maintenance.

– I heard that you introduced subs on the client side.

Inoue: Items and bait are available only for subscribers. Cocone already has a billing system for subs, so it was just a matter of implementing that and it was not a major hassle.

We hope you will love and enjoy it for many years to come.

– I heard that the second anniversary of the reboot in 2023 was also very exciting. What improvements and developments do you have in mind for the future?

Inoue: We need to continue to expand the content of Livly, such as the types of Livly and limited items, for many years to come. In addition, we will continue to expand and develop functions so that customers can live with Livly for a long time to come. We hope that our customers will be able to enjoy their Livly with affection, such as when they say ” this is my baby ” and happily show it off to their friends.

Takafuji: On the server side, we are considering migrating from running on EC2 instances to an environment that can be easily auto-scaled with ECS containers. We are also trying to introduce other tools for observability and promote SRE initiatives.

Inoue: On the client side, Unity updates are a somewhat heavy task that we face on a regular basis. Another challenge is optimizing asset bundles. There are many assets embedded in apps, so we are thinking about taking out the unnecessary ones and making them available for download when needed. This will reduce the number of downloads for our customers and make the apps more comfortable to use.

Takafuji: I’m also glad that the load on the servers has been reduced (laughs).

– What is the attraction of working at Cocone?

Takafuji: Thankfully, we have many customers for all of our applications, so if you are interested in developing large-scale services, this would be a great experience for you. If you have a desire to support a service that is growing rapidly, this is the right job for you. In particular, we would be very happy to have an engineer who can think independently from the customer’s point of view, and who is proactive enough to suggest areas for improvement by saying, “I want to improve this part”.

Inoue: Cocone is also characterized by its rapid service development cycle. For example, it is not unusual for a feature that is being developed now to be released next week, or to be released to the market immediately. The response from customers is also direct. I hope you enjoy this response. I think it will motivate you to grow.

*Please note that we are talking about backstories and thoughts that are separate (Metafictional) from the main story of Livly Island.