Announcing Freefall: Cloud Services for Mobile Apps

For the past few years I've been working as a scalability consultant for Internet startups, mostly on scaling websites. People call me when their Rails servers are crushed by the popularity of their product, and I fix them. There's no magic bullet to scaling. There are a few principles of good design and they are largely not followed, so my job is to bring things back in line with best practices for optimum scaling. For a while I've been thinking about taking these best practices and packaging them up into something people could use directly, rather than implementing the same set of optimizations for each client. However, I found that web companies tend to already be committed to a particular stack. As I've also been doing Android and iOS development lately, I thought mobile developers might be the ideal market for a new, super-scalable backend system. I've noticed that mobile developers aren't that interested in hacking backend code. They'd rather just get on with their mobile apps and leave the backend to someone else. There are a lot of cloud backend services already available, but my idea was different, it was a universal backend for anything from leaderboards to MMOs.

I was pitching this idea to any mobile developer that would listen at SXSW Interactive this year and I was lucky enough to pitch it to John Warren at Minicore Studios. I've known John for a while as I am a friend of the St. Edward's Digital MBA program from which he graduated. He'd been talking about starting a game development studio, and sure enough he had done so and they had a booth at SXSW Screenburn. My pitch to John was that he would not need to hire server-side developers or sysadmins to run the servers for the online components of his games. His mobile front-end developers could just continue writing their games on Android, iOS, PC, and Xbox. There would be client libraries available in all of the necessary languages and the developers could use them like any other library, not ever thinking about the server side of things. The system would be flexible to whatever he needed to do with online services, not limited to a static set of services such as leaderboards and achievements like most cloud services. Best of all, there would be no monthly fees, it would be open source and built on top of Google App Engine, so you just pay Google for your bandwidth and computation, and you only pay for what you use.

I guess John thought it was a good idea, because he hired me on the spot to build this service. I've been working all summer at Minicore building an open source persistant world server for the indie game development community to use free of charge. What can I say? This has been a dream opportunity for me. After spending so much time fixing broken design I was able to build something which follow best practices from the ground up. It's flexible, it's fast, and most of all it scales like crazy.

I'm going to post more technical details soon, as well as documentation and guides. Right now I just wanted to let the world know that this is happening. I just got the first service working, leaderboards for Minicore's Tanks for the Memories for Android, and I decided it was time to make a post. In the meantime, check out the project source (without documentation as of yet) and give a shout out to John to thank him for making this possible for the indie game community.