Plug and Play – Green Man Gaming’s smooth switch to Fastly’s Edge Cloud Platform via AWS Marketplace

The challenge

Retailing, distributing, and publishing video games is a competitive business. And since 2009, UK-based Green Man Gaming has excelled in tackling this challenging sector. Selling blockbuster titles like Silent Hill 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – as well as its own smash Alaskan Road Truckers (rated at 96% on Google).

Green Man Gaming handles around 18 terabytes of traffic in an average month, with surges around seasonal sales like Cyber Week. Adding a robust CDN and WAF at the edge was vital to their business’s success, ensuring that a spike in legitimate traffic or cyberattacks wouldn’t bring the digital shutters down.

But when the relationship with its legacy CDN provider, Cloudflare, became strained; Green Man Gaming reached a crossroads. With continuous back-and-forth discussions around pricing structure and transparency, it decided to source a new partner for CDN and WAF services. And when CTO Lee Packham tasked his trusted procurement partner Softcat with finding a replacement, AWS Marketplace emerged as the best means of streamlining the purchasing process for the new supplier.

The solution

With trust and transparency highlighted as the key criteria for the new partner, Lee asked Green Man Gaming’s primary procurement provider and solution partner, Softcat, to start the search and separate the wheat from the chaff.

“Working with Softcat to choose a new service is super helpful because I’m very direct and don’t want to be mucked around by a supplier,” said Lee. “They prep the partner for the type of person I am, weed out the list and don’t waste my time with inappropriate demos. We’ve been working together for years, so they know our business.”

Softcat quickly identified Fastly as a leading contender to be Green Man Gaming’s new partner. Fastly’s presence on AWS Marketplace is an excellent seal of approval, as AWS’s simplified procurement processes make the transaction hassle-free.

AWS’ Marketplace streamlines procurement by making it faster to find, test, buy, and deploy software – with benefits like standardized license terms, procurement system integration, and AWS cost management tools.

After taking first place on the podium, it was time for Fastly to develop a Proof of Concept (POC) to flex its CDN and Next-Gen WAF’s fit and performance.

Enter Fastly – from POC to migration

Setting up the POC swiftly, the Fastly team was hands-on from the start.

“The Fastly technical resource was very experienced,” said Lee. “He actually understood networks and the challenges of trying to do a POC of this nature. And one of the typical problems with approving a POC is you don’t get long enough to try it out. But Fastly were super-flexible and gave us a lot to test, probably leaving a lot of features on for longer than they should have done so we could test them properly – that was just superb.”

Fastly’s focused support soon paid off. Although planning for a six-month timeline to move the POC to full migration, so strong was Fastly’s solution that the full transition took only two months. Fastly stayed close throughout the timeline, always at Green Man Gaming’s fingertips for practical support and guidance.

“We had them on Slack”, explained Lee. “So, there were review meetings on a weekly basis and whenever a question came up in between, we had a Slack conversation and got through it.”
In terms of customer service as well as technicality, Fastly was already feeling reassuringly different from the incumbent provider.

Clearly beats a black box

Fastly’s CDN and WAF fulfilled all the crucial performance criteria. And with only a two-month migration, Green Man Gaming was quickly operational with a new provider. But not only was the transition smooth, Fastly’s solution put power back in the hands of Green Man Gaming.

“The problem we had with the incumbent is it’s a black box”, said Lee about the previous CDN. “You set it up, you turn it on, and then it doesn’t really tell you much except ‘you’ve had this many visitors’ or ‘you’ve served this much traffic’.”

But Fastly was demonstrably different. There was a significant operational improvement because Green Man Gaming could finally see what was going on and answer problems effectively.

Green Man Gaming’s previous provider offered a high-level view of operations. But Fastly’s Signals technology makes it easier for Lee to dig deeper, to identify different types of threats and traffic originating from various global locations. Vastly improved transparency around service updates is vital. That’s because for Green Man Gaming this demonstrates the confidence to respond to and manage issues proactively and professionally – without operating unseen, in a cloak of silence.

Finally, for a busy professional like Lee, the ultimate accolade for Fastly might be that he hardly notices it’s there. As he said, “I’m not aware of its existence most of the time, and that’s exactly how it should be.”

Key takeaways

When its relationship with its former CDN provider became challenging, Green Man Gaming turned to Softcat and AWS to help source a streamlined and easily onboarded new partner. Understanding its needs, Fastly was able to quickly step in with a strong POC that could be onboarded with a short two-month turnaround. And all while bolstering trust and transparency for Green Man Gaming.

An edge cloud platform that’s the strong and silent type. Sounds like the perfect partner for a no-nonsense business getting ahead of the game.