For nearly 40 years, Ubisoft has been at the forefront of video game development, designing and publishing some of the best-known game franchises in history.
As video games evolved from single platform CD-based assets to more immersive, visually engaging experiences delivered online, the supporting IT infrastructure required to keep games operating at peak performance has also evolved. For Ubisoft, that meant running as many as half a dozen of its own data centers to deliver the best online experience. Starting with bare metal servers, then a virtualized environment and an OpenStack private cloud, the company’s expansive IT footprint now has since been deployed as a platform as a service (PaaS) across several regions, with thousands of applications alongside workloads across multiple public cloud providers. This amount of growth on a dispersed and heterogeneous infrastructure also brought its own secrets management challenges and potential secret sprawl.
“We’ve always preferred to treat our individual teams as studios and allow them to work autonomously because it makes them more agile and responsive to customer demands and the needs of the market without having to rely on a central engineering team to lead the way,” explains Donald Havas, associate director at Ubisoft. “But it also creates some unique and concerning challenges when teams have their own approaches to managing secrets and security because it can result in limited visibility, and a lack of resilience that invites service interruptions or degradation.”
