Effectively managing thousands and thousands of Tamagotchi units with AWS IoT

Tamagotchi Uni, the primary mannequin within the Tamagotchi collection to be outfitted with wi-fi connectivity, is now out there. This new mannequin permits Tamagotchi to attach on to the web and work together with different distinctive Tamagotchi from around the globe. BANDAI CO., LTD., the corporate accountable for product improvement and gross sales, adopted AWS IoT to comprehend the idea of worldwide interconnected Tamagotchi, enabling customers to work together with one another.

On this publish, we share how BANDAI CO., LTD. and their cloud improvement companion, Phoenisys, Inc., used AWS to attach and handle thousands and thousands of Tamagotchi units. Specifically, it was essential to carry out distant updates, utilizing the Jobs characteristic of AWS IoT System Administration to distribute the most recent firmware throughout all Tamagotchi units with out inflicting any delays for patrons.

What are Tamagotchi Uni?

The Tamagotchi is handheld digital pets that customers can nurture. Over 91 million models have been offered worldwide since inception in 1996 and have been appreciated by folks of all ages. The newest mannequin in Tamagotchi collection, Tamagotchi Uni, was launched worldwide on July 15, 2023. This new mannequin permits Tamagotchi to attach on to the web and work together with different distinctive Tamagotchi from around the globe. The imaginative and prescient for the product is to create a world the place Tamagotchi followers the world over can talk with one another utilizing their very own nurtured Tamagotchi.

Tamagotchi Uni evolutions

With wi-fi connectivity, Tamagotchi customers can discover the Tamaverse, a metaverse of Tamagotchi, and meet Tamagotchi nurtured by customers around the globe. Moreover, Tamagotchi Uni are straight related to the cloud, permitting customers to constantly obtain new occasions and gadgets for distribution. Connectivity additionally allows customers to concurrently compete and cooperate with one another. These functionalities are potential as a result of AWS IoT Core, which presents dependable cloud connectivity throughout many AWS Areas.

Safe connectivity with AWS IoT and a serverless structure

To make Tamagotchi Uni IoT-enabled, BANDAI established the next three key targets:

• Implementing safe connections
• Scaling and load-balancing assets to accommodate over 1 million connections worldwide
• Optimizing operational prices

The Tamagotchi resolution has been carried out on an AWS serverless structure utilizing AWS IoT.

AWS structure for Tamagotchi Uni

This part briefly describes how AWS providers are used within the structure to assist enhance the reliability and cost-effectiveness of growing, working, and managing Tamagotchi Uni.

AWS IoT Core

Tamagotchi Uni use AWS IoT Core for authentication, connection, and messaging. The System Shadow characteristic is used to handle the state of every Tamagotchi Uni machine, utilizing the delta of the shadow as a flag to retrieve distributed gadgets and content material. This ensures environment friendly communication between the machine and AWS, facilitating seamless interplay.

AWS IoT System Administration

The event workforce anticipated that managing the rising provide of Tamagotchi Uni units would turn out to be difficult. Subsequently, they used AWS IoT System Administration to index the in depth Tamagotchi Uni fleet and create dynamic teams based mostly on the state of every machine, facilitating environment friendly over-the-air (OTA) updates.

FreeRTOS

The Tamagotchi Uni machine software program that connects to AWS runs on FreeRTOS, which minimizes the quantity of assets and code required to implement device-to-cloud communication for environment friendly system improvement.

AWS Lambda

Tamagotchi Uni use AWS Lambda for processing duties, delivering new bulletins, and registering property.

Amazon DynamoDB

Tamagotchi Uni use Amazon DynamoDB as a totally managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database that runs high-performance functions at any scale.

Amazon Easy Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Tamagotchi Uni use Amazon S3 as an object storage service that gives industry-leading scalability, information availability, safety, and efficiency. Every of those information shops are used to handle the varied assets inside Tamagotchi Uni.

Amazon Timestream

Tamagotchi Uni use Amazon Timestream to build up historic information of person’s actions like downloading gadgets and extra content material.

Challenges in firmware distribution to all units

The workforce will use AWS IoT Jobs to replace Tamagotchi Uni with new video games and content material by means of periodic firmware updates. Whereas Jobs makes firmware updates straightforward and safe, the workforce discovered that the default most variety of job executions per hour (1,000 models per minute) would lead to an excessive amount of time required to finish updates for the entire units.

The prolonged time would trigger delays and an inconsistent expertise for patrons. Some clients may be taught that different customers obtained the replace and are having fun with the brand new content material whereas their very own machine is outdated. For patrons desirous to get pleasure from the brand new content material as quickly as potential, the extended look forward to the replace can lead to vital stress.

Whereas it’s potential to regulate the quota for the utmost variety of job executions that may be delivered per minute, there are limits.

Overcoming challenges with large-scale firmware updates

To reduce wait occasions, the workforce modified the firmware replace course of in order that the replace can be executed when the client agreed to the replace. Because the replace course of requires human intervention, it can’t be carried out on all units on the identical time. Contemplating that the timing of server inquiries could differ relying on the client’s taking part in surroundings and time variations, the workforce decided that it wouldn’t be essential to distribute the replace to all units on the identical time. The brand new coverage prioritizes ordered distribution to clients who make replace inquiries.

To technically notice the brand new coverage, the workforce designed job supply as a steady job, with the job goal being dynamic factor teams relatively than particular person issues (see following determine). Dynamic factor teams are a characteristic of AWS IoT System Administration that permits you to set search situations for issues registered in AWS IoT when creating a bunch. On this case, when issues are added to the dynamic factor group after the job is created, the job is delivered instantly to these newly added issues. This permits for sooner and extra environment friendly job supply, particularly delivering to the units that meet the set situations.

The mechanism and ingenuity of the firmware distribution for Tamagotchi

The fleet indexing characteristic mechanically searches for issues that meet the situations and dynamically provides them to the factor group.
On this challenge, the question situations for the dynamic factor group have been configured into the next 4 situations:

1. The firmware model of shadow.reported is greater than the preliminary model
2. The firmware model of shadow.reported just isn’t the most recent model to be distributed
3. The firmware model of shadow.desired is the most recent model to be delivered
4. connectivity.timestamp is bigger than the desired UNIX epoch milliseconds

All 4 of those situations have been mixed with the logical operator AND.

Looking for related units

Noteworthy among the many question situations is the usage of the connection timestamp (connectivity.timestamp) of the machine as a fourth search situation. This permits the job to focus on solely these units which have a confirmed connection file. The connection standing (connectivity.related:true) is also included within the question. Nonetheless, if the connection standing is used as a situation, the machine can be faraway from the dynamic group when the Tamagotchi Uni restarts after an replace and the firmware picture and job data can’t be verified. That is why the workforce determined to make use of the connection timestamp as a situation as an alternative of the connection standing. The UNIX epoch milliseconds within the situation is about to 1 hour earlier than the dynamic group creation timing. This strategy enabled us to effectively distribute updates by including them to a dynamic group based mostly on the order of consumers’ inquiries concerning the supply of updates.

Managing firmware variations with System Shadow

The primary three talked about search situations use System Shadow. Tamagotchi Uni use System Shadow for the administration of replace flags for all property, together with updates and extra content material. By enabling units to retrieve information solely when there’s an replace within the shadow, it helps cut back the frequency of communication. Tamagotchi Uni additionally use System Shadow to handle firmware variations and search situations in dynamic group queries 1-3, particularly, the shadow.desired situation in question 3. Nonetheless, this strategy introduced a problem. To inform updates for therefore many focused units, it might require updating the shadow of every machine individually. Consequently, updating the shadows of all units took a major period of time, which impacted the distribution pace.

As an answer, the workforce determined to replace the shadows in parallel. The next procedures and configurations helped to cut back the replace time considerably:

1. Creating an SQS queue to observe the progress standing of dynamic group creation after it has been executed.
2. Polling monitoring the progress standing of the dynamic group rebuild with up to date question situations.
3. When all goal issues turn out to be members of the dynamic group and the rebuild completes, retrieve the issues which have turn out to be members in batches of as much as 250 units at a time, and subject a message to the SQS queue requesting a shadow replace.
4. When a message is issued to the SQS queue, a Lambda is named in parallel to replace the shadow.

This circulate improved the person expertise by effectively and shortly distributing updates within the order of buyer inquiry.

Testing system efficiency

Lastly, as a part of load testing, BANDAI created numerous simulated units that emulated the entry habits of Tamagotchi Uni and have been capable of confirm the sleek operation and efficiency of the replace. The take a look at allowed the workforce to really feel assured that efficiency can be secure and might be maintained, even beneath large-scale entry.

Conclusion

Tamagotchi Uni, the primary mannequin within the Tamagotchi collection to characteristic wi-fi connectivity, have created a world the place Tamagotchi followers can really feel related no matter gender, age, or nationality. This publish offered an in depth view on how Tamagotchi Uni use AWS to attain safe and dependable connectivity and shortly ship new content material updates with out leaving clients ready.

Japanese model of this weblog publish could be discovered right here.

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