How Lilith Games Used Cloud‑Native Architecture to Transform AFK Journey

Introduction

AFK Journey: Journey launched on August 8 and quickly topped new‑game charts; it is Lilith Games' first attempt to blend idle‑card mechanics with a world‑map system.

Cloud‑Native Background and Motivation

Cost and efficiency have become hot topics in game infrastructure. Traditional operations scale poorly, incurring high labor and resource expenses that conflict with the fine‑grained operational needs of modern games.

To address this, Lilith Games chose a cloud‑native architecture. Kubernetes provides powerful orchestration, decouples resources from workloads, and offers declarative operations that enable self‑healing, elastic scaling, and reduced manpower. Containers unify development and testing environments, accelerate iteration, and improve online robustness.

Challenges of Cloud‑Native Migration for Game Servers

Game servers are stateful, caching player data in memory, making graceful lifecycle management difficult. Kubernetes Pods abstract only infrastructure state, not business state, so a mechanism to expose and act on business state is required for seamless updates.

Hot‑update of game resources is essential to avoid downtime, yet container environments struggle with version management, rollback, and real‑time status detection.

Pod restarts change IPs and names; Deployments cannot target specific server instances, and StatefulSets lack fine‑grained control, leaving game‑server containerization in a bind.

Kruise Enables Smooth Containerization of Game Servers

In 2021 Lilith decided to adopt cloud‑native for AFK Journey, but Kubernetes lacked a workload that matched game‑specific needs. The open‑source project OpenKruise, with its in‑place update capability, fit the stateful nature of game servers, replacing native Deployments and StatefulSets.

Using Kruise, Lilith split the game server into a sidecar container that holds hot‑update resources. New images replace these resources without affecting the main container, ensuring players experience no interruption.

Beyond Kruise, Lilith built a custom Operator that reads game‑specific status from the sidecar and orchestrates graceful updates based on business state.

Results

Resource utilization increased by 40‑60%.

Release cycle shortened from hours to minutes.

Operational management cost reduced by over 40%.

Building a Cloud‑Native Gaming Community

Since 2022 Lilith has collaborated closely with the OpenKruise community, co‑creating OpenKruiseGame (OKG) to provide generic, game‑aware workloads, multi‑cloud support (Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Volcengine), and to help other studios adopt cloud‑native practices, such as Lilith's "Gods Party".

Lilith also contributed the Faketime project, enabling time manipulation inside containerized game servers for reward distribution and event timing.