Epic Games transforms gaming—and other industries—by innovating on AWS

Epic Games (Epic) went all in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2018 to deliver the storage, analytics, and scaling capabilities critical to its business, which had exploded with the release of Fortnite—an online game that’s seen over 15.3 million concurrent players during live events. Fortnite runs almost entirely on AWS, including its worldwide game-server fleet, backend services, and websites. Epic also stores petabytes of data in an AWS data lake, then uses AWS analytics services to assess player sentiment and inform the development of unique experiences.

“We decided to go all-in using AWS because they enable us to offer a quality gaming experience to millions of gamers around the world, simultaneously. We are excited to work with AWS to expand our use of analytics, machine learning, and containerized applications using Kubernetes to make our sizable infrastructure even easier to maintain.”

Chris Dyl
Director of Platform, Epic Games

Learn how Epic Games builds on AWS to drive innovation and enable both its own and the broader creator community across industries from games to automotive and entertainment.

Here’s a highlight of Epic Games’ AWS stories:

Epic Games Delivers Entertainment Experiences at Global Scale on AWS

Building on AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Epic delivers cutting-edge virtual entertainment experiences that connect millions of concurrent players all over the world. In this video, learn how Epic automatically scales compute capacity to meet constant fluctuations in player demand, supporting up to 30 times load during peak times while reducing operational costs using Savings Plans.

Virtual Production and the Rise of the Microstudio on Unreal Engine and AWS

Epic’s Unreal Fellowship offers in-depth training and funding for film, animation, and VFX professionals to use Unreal Engine for real-time media production. In this blog, Unreal Fellow Hasraf “HaZ” Dulull explains how the combination of Unreal Engine’s state-of-the-art virtual production tools with the powerful but cost-effective capabilities of AWS has facilitated the dawn of the “microstudio,” giving small teams the ability to create movie-quality content in real time.

Using tens of thousands of Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton processors, Epic scales compute capacity at optimal price performance to support millions of global gamers every day, accelerate rendering workloads, and provide remote build pipelines for both its own and licensee Unreal Engine creators. On AWS, Epic has reduced the physical and time-consuming barriers to creating cutting-edge entertainment, compelling visualizations, and immersive virtual worlds.