Crosswords & Games - NYTimes.com

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Since its publication in 1942, the New York Times crossword puzzle has become an integral part of everyday life for many people. When the Times established the first website in 1996, the digital version of the crossword game quickly became a standalone digital version. Was originally built as a web-based Java applet, Crossword has evolved into a fully interactive website with mobile apps and over 300,000 paid subscribers. To handle advanced functions such as providing puzzle data to many subscribers and synchronizing the progress of the game among multiple devices, our backend system is an Amazon Web with a similar LAMP architecture It runs on the service. A free daily mini word entry game, launched in August 2014, brought more daily crowds putting more pressure on our architecture.

Various crossword puzzles are very popular. Is crossword a game? In fact, it is not a game, it's just a puzzle. Because there is only one correct answer, it can not make meaningful decisions that will affect the results. You either know the correct answer or do not know the answer. Therefore, crossword puzzles are not very attractive not only for text search and other puzzles, but also for teenagers and adults unless you add game elements. The most obvious thing is to add a competitive element when splitting the group into two groups. And the team who completed the task first is the winner. Or you can set the time limit and ask the maximum number of correct answers. For example, 2 minutes is the winner.

As crossword became more common, our architecture began to meet the limitations of expansion in handling game traffic. Due to the inelastic architecture of our legacy system, we need to extend the system to handle our peak traffic at 10 pm at the daily puzzle release. Traditional stacks tend to require some degree of human interaction, which can take hours to scale up and down. It must be extended in a few minutes. This system is usually very expensive for the New York Times game team, as this system usually only has peak traffic for a few minutes a day. Fortunately, we recently decided to migrate all product development to Google Cloud Platform. So wait for the tool to move faster and reduce cost.