How Cloud‑Native Architecture Powered Lingxi Interactive’s Global Game Expansion

About Lingxi Interactive

Lingxi Interactive is a game R&D and operation company that targets global markets with a “one‑game‑one‑backend” model, covering SLG, card, MMORPG and open‑world survival sandbox titles. By the end of 2020 its flagship Three Kingdoms: Strategy was launched overseas on a Kubernetes‑based platform.

Global Expansion Challenges

Since 2018 the company faced resource waste, architectural fragmentation and poor scalability when scaling abroad. Overseas markets required flexible release strategies, multi‑region low‑latency connectivity, fragmented data management, and heavy security and cost‑control demands.

Building a Unified Global Infrastructure

The technical team decided to create a reusable global infrastructure platform based on Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) and a custom cloud‑native operations platform called KUN.

Three‑Layer Architecture

Kernel layer : ACK provides standardized container scheduling and defines business models.

Core layer : Compute, storage and network resources ensure flexibility and scalability.

Extension layer : Plug‑in or SaaS extensions add service‑type adaptability.

Automation and Scaling

By leveraging ACK’s elastic container management, scaling logic is expressed as IaC + GitOps policies. Monitoring triggers automatic resource provisioning, initialization, network tagging and CI/CD‑driven rolling updates, reducing expansion time from hours to seconds. OpenKruiseGame enables in‑place hot updates without server downtime.

Storage and Observability

ACK integrates Alibaba Cloud NAS for persistent, high‑performance storage. Logs are automatically collected by SLS, packages are uploaded to OSS, and a full‑stack observability stack (SLS + CMS + ARMS) provides end‑to‑end monitoring of latency, payment delays and matchmaking performance.

FinOps Practices

The team implemented a FinOps framework that tags resources, visualizes cost, and uses ACK’s auto‑scaling to match capacity with player count, achieving over 40 % cost reduction in two years while maintaining high availability.

Results and Outlook

Infrastructure failure rates dropped to single digits, operation efficiency improved by more than 97 %, and cloud cost decreased dramatically. The company plans to further refine its cloud‑native solution to meet security and resource challenges in additional international markets.