Architect to handle game virality and scale with user demand
Social gaming and online sports betting are competitive environments. Your game must be able to handle large volumes of unpredictable traffic while simultaneously promising zero downtime. For these companies, user retention is no longer just desirable, it’s critical. Gamers expect to play whenever they want for as long as they want, and have a low tolerance for delays or lag. At the heart of any successful game is a database that maintains 100% uptime, scales in real time to handle millions of users or more, and provides users a responsive and personalized experience across all of their devices. This is why gaming and betting companies choose Couchbase as they move away from monolithic solutions to microservice-based architectures, focusing on building engaging, responsive, and scalable applications.
Customer success spotlight
Betfair uses Couchbase to process 30,000 bets per minute from more than 4 million funded user accounts across 140 countries.
Learn moreacross 140 countries
Jam City scaled its popular app Cookie Jam to meet the demand of 5 million users globally in under 8 months – and earned Facebook game of the year.
Learn morein under 8 months
Why Couchbase NoSQL for gaming applications
Scale: Easier, more affordable scalability
For social games that have the potential to go viral, the ability to start small and grow instantly is critical. Equally, the ability to scale down as the lifecycle of a game tails off allows reclamation of resources without having to switch technologies. Meeting the demand for games with thousands, if not millions, of players can overwhelm relational databases with increasing, even volatile workloads. Unlike relational databases like Oracle and MySQL, Couchbase supports these ever-increasing workloads and spikes in throughput demands and scales (in, out, up, or down) easily and without disruption.
Performance: Better performance than any other database
The most important aspect of any game is its player experience, and with rising expectations and the need for instant gratification, guaranteeing consistent, low-latency data access is critical. While other NoSQL databases like MongoDB™ require a third-party cache – adding to both cost and complexity – Couchbase has a fully integrated read-through and write-through caching layer. Couchbase’s memory and network-centric architecture consistently delivers the sub-millisecond responsiveness that today’s users expect.
Availability: Built-in high availability and disaster recovery
Player experience begins with availability. With users worldwide, a game not only has to be available 24x7, 365 days a year, it has to be available everywhere – with no single point of failure. Couchbase provides five-nines availability with built-in high availability and flexible cross data center replication (XDCR) capabilities that supports disaster recovery and data locality requirements. With Couchbase, you have full control over the topology – unidirectional, bidirectional, or any configuration you need.
Mobile: Integrated mobile capabilities support omnichannel experiences
Today’s gamer expects great experiences on their personal devices. Couchbase is the only NoSQL database with built-in mobile support. Couchbase Mobile extends Couchbase Server to the edge with an embedded NoSQL database (Couchbase Lite) and a web gateway (Sync Gateway), enabling apps to work offline regardless of network availability, and powering use cases at the edge such as personalization, peer-to-peer messaging and sharing, and more.
Flexibility: Lower costs and faster time to market
Couchbase drives the flexibility and increased operational efficiency you need to keep up with the constantly updated and changing gaming data. Couchbase’s powerful query language allows developers to easily query JSON data using familiar, SQL-like expressions. Tightly integrated full-text search, real-time analytics, and powerful eventing services make it easy to add new features to your application on the fly without moving data into and managing dozens of database technologies, finally putting an end to database sprawl.
Analytics: Integrated analytics capabilities for real-time data insights
Couchbase Analytics reduces the time to insight on operational data and simplifies operations for analytical data pipelines. Run ad hoc queries on data for real-time results and apply real-time analytics to monitor your applications.
Industry use cases & solutions
User profile
Store user-profile data to support multiple services and enable users to play games across different platforms and devices.
Session store
Manage user sessions using in-memory data that provides low-latency performance and enables play to resume if interrupted.
Messaging
Enable players to message friends, invite them to join games, and receive notifications about changes to their player state.
Mainframe offload
Improve response times and substantially lower costs by caching frequently used data and reducing workloads.
Personalization
Maintain game and player data for achievements, stats, leaderboards, teams, social feeds, personalized offers, and more.
Customer 360
Capture omnichannel engagements to create a single view and provide real-time, personalized data, updates, and offers at every touchpoint.
Catalog & inventory management
Deliver catalog and inventory data at scale to keep up with changing gaming and betting content.
Field service
Provide or collect data at the source and enable users to access data even when the device is offline.
IoT data management
Leverage connected devices to deliver content and personalized offers to users in real time.
Related resources
![]()
Whitepaper
![]()
Blogs & Videos
- Building a reactive game engine with Spring 5 & Couchbase at Playtika
- Scaling a Couchbase cluster for increasing and decreasing demand
- Couchbase high availability and disaster recovery: Setting up XDCR step by step
- Next level high availability with Couchbase Server 5.5
- Getting started with data synchronization using Couchbase Mobile for offline-first apps
- Using Couchbase Analytics for complex and efficient queries in a Java application
![]()
Documentation & Tutorials
- Betfair places a bet on NoSQL
- The secret ingredient to Cookie Jam’s success – how Couchbase helped them scale to meet the needs of 35M users
- See how gaming customers are using Couchbase
- Learn more about Couchbase’s multi-dimensional scaling
- See how Couchbase outperforms on enterprise workloads
- Couchbase availability
- Build a sample app with Couchbase Mobile
- Learn more about N1QL, our SQL for JSON query language
- Take the N1QL tutorial
- Deploying the Analytics service