By Åsa Bredin, FVP Technology and Jacques Erasmus, CIO

Every month, more than 270 million people around the world play a King game. Our mission — which we share with our parent company Activision Blizzard — is to bring those players moments of magic in their everyday life.

We believe it is a harmony of art, craft, science, marketing and technology which allows us to do this. At the intersection of science and technology is our world-class data analytics capability, which we use every day across the business to understand how our players interact with our games — and then to make those games even more fun and engaging for our players.

Today, King has one of Europe’s largest Hadoop clusters, with a double-digit number of petabytes online for our data science and engineering communities to query. In the last couple of years, we started to ask ourselves whether a monolithic on-premise Hadoop environment best set us up for the challenges of the future, particularly in a world where public cloud is becoming an ever-greater part of the IT landscape, and — especially important for us — when much of the innovation in data science and data engineering is now taking place in public cloud. At the same time, a number of our teams had started to do more work with machine learning and AI — again, increasingly a public cloud story — so this was also a factor for us to consider.

After increasing amounts of investigation, discussion, benchmarking, and, finally, sign off from King’s leadership, we’ve made the decision to move our core data infrastructure and AI/ML platform to Google Cloud, and we are very pleased to be able to announce that today.

We believe that our move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — a transformational change for King that is already under way — will amplify our own talented engineers’ efforts, allow us to focus more on differentiation — areas of effort where King needs unique capabilities not provided by the market — and reinvigorate King’s reputation as one of the most innovative and future-facing tech companies in Europe.

We’re also super happy to work with Google Cloud on this move, and consider our relationship — or rather the many relationships which our teams have already established across the Google Cloud organisation — to be a genuine partnership that is a win-win for both companies.

“King has long been a leader in delivering delightful mobile gaming experiences to millions of players around the world. King will continue to innovate and demonstrate its leadership position as a global innovator by utilizing our big data, AI and machine learning capabilities to give its engineers the next generation of tools to build great experiences. We look forward to seeing King deliver even richer gaming experiences for players worldwide through our deep collaboration and the unique products and services Google Cloud offers game developers.” Sunil Rayan, Managing Director, Gaming, Google Cloud.

We now look forward to completing our migration to GCP, leveraging the reliability, scalability and agility which the platform provides as the foundation on which our teams can continue to do great things, and to deliver for our players.

Join the Kingdom — Jobs.King.com

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