Cloud computing – known as the cloud – has changed the course of how we deliver and consume IT services.

Before the arrival of the cloud, IT service providers’ focus was mostly on the provisioning of physical infrastructure – servers, storage, and networks – and the management of it. Enter the cloud, putting state-of-the-art technology at our fingertips that can be provisioned over the internet with a click, near instantly and infinitely – it’s like hailing an omnipresent supercar taxi instead of buying a new car every few years.

The cloud has enabled massive opportunities for IT service providers, but it presents an existential challenge to classic IT practices at the same time. Nonetheless, Studio IT has embraced cloud transformation and is leading the delivery of mission-critical systems into the cloud – including high-profile games.

Some well-known and much-loved games are architected and built in the cloud, and when you play these games online, you’re playing, creating, scoring, and chatting on machines that live in the cloud.

PlayStation Studios’ investment in utilizing the cloud has yielded some incredibly efficient ways that help us deliver games to players:

  • Shorter lead-times – near-instant deployment of infrastructure
  • Lower risks – no commitment and losses in the event of unplanned changes
  • Better agility and elasticity – scale infrastructure up and down and in and out at will
  • Better performance – access to the latest and greatest technology
  • Better value – less time provisioning infrastructure means more time to focus on business value

As a result, we’re observing a greater throughput of value-driven, timely, and change-tolerant projects.

Most recently and notably, we have received acclaim for putting motion graphics rendering capabilities into the cloud for our studios and in just a few months it performs 1200% faster than its physical cousin!

Studio IT is stepping-up its cloud adoption and cloud governance strategies and is launching and migrating IT services more innovatively and securely into the cloud as we work towards our vision of cloud “all-in”, which is to run entire game studios in the cloud – multiplayer games, render farms, motions graphics, video editing, and everything else.

Our mission is simple – “Tailored IT to Fuel Creativity” – to support our studios so they can continue to launch the best games in the industry.

For those embarking on the cloud adoption journey, a lesson learned is to “be prepared to learn what you think you already know”. The fundamental building blocks are the same and we know them well:

  • Compute – servers of various sizes and power that provide the capability to process data and execute instructions, for example, to count your score in an online multiplayer game
  • Storage – individual or collective disks that are used to store data, for example, to save said game score
  • Network – the cabling and systems that join the compute and storage devices together to communicate

The cloud abstracts and combines these resources to provide new architecture possibilities every day – change is the only constant.

To yield the true value of the cloud requires us to change our individual and collective perspective of IT service delivery – the adoption of a cloud culture is just as important as the technology.

Would you like to be part of a global team that is helping build and engineer the next generation of entertainment through our global network? Check out our available open roles at PlayStation Careers.