Game time
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.”
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