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**Erik St. Martin:** And our special guest today is actually Luna Duclos. I don't wanna spoil a little too much about what we're gonna talk about, so I'll let you give a little introduction about yourself and what you're working on. |
**Luna Duclos:** Alright, hi everyone! I'm Luna Duclos, and I am one of the few game developers that works full-time with Go. Today we'll be talking a little bit more about that - what I do day-to-day, how the development stack at my current job works, and probably a bit about my previous job as well, and some of the o... |
**Erik St. Martin:** The game development is one of the really exciting areas; you're one of the few people that I've heard do game development. Is this like backend server technology for MMOs, or is this actual frontend, OpenGL, DirectX stuff? Where is that line drawn with Go, versus other languages you might use? |
**Luna Duclos:** In my case I don't touch the client computers at all. There won't be a single line of my code running on anyone's computer, except for our own servers. What I mostly work on is the web stack, as well as the game servers themselves. |
In my case, I work on a game called the Hunter Classic. It is an online single and multiplayer game with regular competitions, leaderboards between hunters. A large website, regular competitions and that kind of stuff. |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's really interesting. So I guess understanding the game a little bit helps with what the infrastructure is, because different types of games have different needs. Is this like a zone based game? |
**Luna Duclos:** No, it is a lobby based game. If you've played Diablo, it's a perfect example. Diablo has a lobby; you can create a game, you can join other people's games... In the Hunter's case, the actual multiplayer is peer-to-peer, so there is no involvement from the server for the actual multiplayer play in the ... |
What the servers do is they handle all the competitions, the whole scoring system, as well as regular rotations, an in-game store, inventory management, that kind of stuff. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Oh, excellent. |
**Luna Duclos:** Basically, they handle all the stuff that persists between games, while the actual multiplayer within a game session is handled peer-to-peer. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** And what sort of technologies are the client side the game's written in? |
**Luna Duclos:** Like most other companies, we use C++ to write game clients. Avalanche Studios, which is my employer, has their own engine which they use to build all their games, so that's what's also being used for The Hunter Classic. |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[03:59\] So what was the motivation for using Go on the server side, with already having a development group that is familiar with C++ and stuff? Was there a productivity gain, or...? |
**Luna Duclos:** There were multiple reasons. The main reason is that the existing servers before I started were not written in C++ to start with. They are written in PHP and Python, running on [AppEngine](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/). It works; the old servers are still powering the game and doing their thing,... |
We have several Go servers running on [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/), and all new features are going to those servers, rather than the old Python app engine ones. We're also slowly migrating over all features to the new servers, as time allows. The main reason is mostly that Go is much faster, which means cheaper... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Okay, so this is kind of like a microservice based architecture, and inventory management is handled by one service; rather than kind of continuing to maintain that particular service that may be running in PHP or Python, you're slowly rebuilding these things in Go. |
**Luna Duclos:** That's right. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Okay. And what kind of performance and resource benefits or gains have you seen from that? Are you significantly less servers now that you're rolling these things over? |
**Luna Duclos:** There's two performance gains we've seen. One, we're moving from Python to Go - that's the obvious one, Go is much faster, consumes much less CPU. But there's a second gain as well, and that's moving from App Engine to actual VMs. App Engine servers are quite small, and constrained on CPU despite that ... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Nice. |
**Erik St. Martin:** You said you're also doing Kubernetes too, right? |
**Luna Duclos:** Yeah, the whole new Go cluster is running in Kubernetes. It's running in Google Cloud on a [GKE](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/) cluster, which is Google's managed Kubernetes offering. So we don't have to manage the cluster ourselves, Google does it for us. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** One of the biggest things that I remember in the last couple of months that you did was the [Kube-Cert-Manager extension for Kubernetes](https://github.com/PalmStoneGames/kube-cert-manager). Can you tell us about that? That's really exciting. |
**Luna Duclos:** Yeah, it was actually from my previous job, though. As some people might know, I used to be self-employed and had my own business called Palm Stone Games. I was also running Kubernetes clusters at Palm Stone games, and as part of that we were using [LetsEncrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/) as our SSL pro... |
We did not want to request certs manually every month - that's just asking for things to expire - and neither did we want to use Kubernetes Ingress objects, which was the only way to get LetsEncrypt to work automatically at the time. |
So I ended up deciding to fork Kelsey Hightower's Kube-Cert-Manager project. I took all the documentation, as well as the basic approach of how things work, and I decided to rewrite the whole codebase to use Xenolf/Lego instead of a self-rolled Lego library, which meant that Kube-Cert-Manager, my fork, magically had su... |
\[08:11\] That was the main motivation for everything. There were already documentations in place, there was already a designing place for how things work, it just needed to be fleshed out to work with more DNS providers and be easier to deploy and set up. So that's what I did with the rewrite of it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Are these still two individual projects, or have they since been merged together? |
**Luna Duclos:** They are two individual projects still, however there hasn't really been any activity on Kelsey's fork, so I'm not sure how alive it actually is. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Kelsey's was just a proof of concept that he wrote for a talk. I don't think he intended it to be a long-living project. |
**Luna Duclos:** That's right. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So that's really cool. I've used your extension and it's awesome. |
**Luna Duclos:** Thank you! |
**Erik St. Martin:** And for anybody who might not be aware of what we're talking about, as you throw up individual services that may be publically exposed in Kubernetes, this is basically something that you can run inside your Kubernetes cluster to basically issue SSL certificates on the fly using LetsEncrypt for the ... |
All of us remember struggling through -- you have to go to your SSL provider and you have to get all the certs and then upload them to all the servers... All of that is gone. I hate getting the emails... I actually spaced out my SSL cert renewals so that I wouldn't have to do a bunch at one time. \[laughter\] |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Now I get emails from LetsEncrypt that says my certificates are expiring and it's yet another reminder of failed projects... You know, this thing that I started up a couple months ago, isn't in use anymore, your certificate is expiring... "Oh yeah, I remember when I did that." \[laughter\] It's just... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Whenever I get the domain renewals I have to question my motivation, like... I was pretty dumb for buying that before, and I've not used it for three years now. Um, I'm gonna renew it anyway... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, let's renew it. \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** You know, it's that whole "One day this might be useful to me." |
**Luna Duclos:** Well, I guess they cost little enough, that's actually a valid reasoning too. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So actually, here's proof... Brian had owned [GopherAcademy.com](https://gopheracademy.com/) for some reason long before we had ever considered a conference or anything like that, and it was like "Well, we kind of need an entity to run the conference... Hey, don't you still own GopherAcademy?" |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, let me whip out my domain Rolodex and let's take a look. |
**Luna Duclos:** That is awesome! |
**Erik St. Martin:** So there is proof right there that this happens. It could be useful one day. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's right. I'm validated. Thank you, Erik. I'm buying more domains now. I'll be back. \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** You're like, "But one of them... One of them was actually useful!" So what other projects are you working on these days? |
**Luna Duclos:** I recently released a project called [Instrumented SQL](https://github.com/ExpansiveWorlds/instrumentedsql). With the Go 1.8 release we had this nice context that we could pass to the database SQL package, but no one seemed to have started working on instrumentation using that concept, so I ended up ne... |
\[11:54\] It's a wrapping driver, basically. It will grab another SQL driver, it will wrap it with instrumentation and logging, and you can then call the wrapping driver using just a regular database SQL package, and everything will automatically be traced and logged for you based on the tracer and logger object in the... |
There is one caveat, and that's it grabs tracers and loggers from the context - that means you cannot use the non-context functions, because those cannot be traced, because it doesn't know what request they belong to. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Oh, interesting. |
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