Tag Archives: AWS Mobile Development

New Solution – Clickstream Analytics on AWS for Mobile and Web Applications

2023-07-07 Sébastien Stormacq

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-solution-clickstream-analytics-on-aws-for-mobile-and-web-applications/

Starting today, you can deploy on your AWS account an end-to-end solution to capture, ingest, store, analyze, and visualize your customers’ clickstreams inside your web and mobile applications (both for Android and iOS). The solution is built on top of standard AWS services.

This new solution Clickstream Analytics on AWS allows you to keep your data in the security and compliance perimeter of your AWS account and customize the processing and analytics as you require, giving you the full flexibility to extract value for your business. For example, many business line owners want to combine clickstream analytics data with business system data to gain more comprehensive insights. Storing clickstream analysis data in your AWS account allows you to cross reference the data with your existing business system, which is complex to implement when you use a third-party analytics solution that creates an artificial data silo.

Clickstream Analytics on AWS is available from the AWS Solutions Library at no cost, except for the services it deploys on your account.

Why Analyze Your Applications Clickstreams?
Organizations today are in search of vetted solutions and architectural guidance to rapidly solve business challenges. Whether you prefer off-the-shelf deployments or customizable architectures, the AWS Solutions Library carries solutions built by AWS and AWS Partners for a broad range of industry and technology use cases.

When I talk with mobile and web application developers or product owners, you often tell me that you want to use a clickstream analysis solution to understand your customers’ behavior inside your application. Click stream analysis solutions help you to identify popular and frequently visited screens, analyze navigation patterns, identify bottlenecks and drop-off points, or perform A/B testing of functionalities such as the pay wall, but you face two challenges to adopt or build a click stream analysis solution.

Either you use a third-party library and analytics solution that sends all your application and customer data to an external provider, which causes security and compliance risks and makes it more difficult to reference your existing business data to enrich the analysis, or you dedicate time and resources to build your own solution based on AWS services, such as Amazon Kinesis (for data ingestion), Amazon EMR (for processing), Amazon Redshift (for storage), and Amazon QuickSight (for visualization). Doing so ensures your application and customer data stay in the security perimeter of your AWS account, which is already approved and vetted by your information and security team. Often, building such a solution is an undifferentiated task that drives resources and budget away from developing the core business of your application.

Introducing Clickstream Analytics on AWS
The new solution Clickstream Analytics on AWS provides you with a backend for data ingestion, processing, and visualization of click stream data. It’s shipped as an AWS CloudFormation template that you can easily deploy into the AWS account of your choice.

In addition to the backend component, the solution provides you with purpose-built Java and Swift SDKs to integrate into your mobile applications (for both Android and iOS). The SDKs automatically collects data and provide developers with an easy-to-use API to collect application-specific data. They manage the low-level tasks of buffering the data locally, sending them to the backend, managing the retries in case of communication errors, and more.

The following diagram shows you the high-level architecture of the solution.

The solution comes with an easy-to-use console to configure your solution. For example, it allows you to choose between three AWS services to ingest the application clickstream data: Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). You can create multiple data pipelines for multiple applications or teams, each using a different configuration. This allows you to adjust the backend to the application user base and requirements.

You can use plugins to transform the data during the processing phase. The solution comes with two plugins preinstalled: User-Agent enrichment and IP address enrichment to add additional data that’s related to the User-Agent and the geolocation of the IP address used by the client applications.

By default, it provides a Amazon Redshift Serverless cluster to minimize the costs, but you can select a provisioned Amazon Redshift configuration to meet your performance and budget requirements.

Finally, the solution provides you with a set of pre-assembled visualization dashboards to report on user acquisition, user activity, and user engagement. The dashboard consumes the data available in Amazon Redshift. You’re free to develop other analytics and other dashboards using the tools and services of your choice.

Let’s See It in Action
The best way to learn how to deploy and to configure Clickstream Analytics on AWS is to follow the tutorial steps provided by the Clickstream Analytics on AWS workshop.

The workshop goes into great detail about each step. Here are the main steps I did to deploy the solution:

1. I create the control plane (the management console) of the solution using this CloudFormation template. The output of the template contains the URL to the management console. I later receive an email with a temporary password for the initial connection.

2. On the Clickstream Analytics console, I create my first project and define various network parameters such as the VPC, subnets, and security groups. I also select the service to use for data ingestion and my choice of configuration for Amazon Redshift.

3. When I enter all configuration data, the console creates the data plane for my application.

AWS services and solutions are usually built around a control plane and one or multiple data planes. In the context of Clickstream Analytics, the control plane is the console that I use to define my data acquisition and analysis project. The data plane is the infrastructure to receive, analyze, and visualize my application data. Now that I define my project, the console generates and launches another CloudFormation template to create and manage the data plane.

4. The Clickstream Analytics console generates a JSON configuration file to include into my application and it shares the Java or Swift code to include into my Android or iOS application. The console provides instructions to add the clickstream analysis as a dependency to my application. I also update my application code to insert the code suggested and start to deploy.

5. After my customers start to use the mobile app, I access the Clickstream Analytics dashboard to visualize the data collected.

The Dashboards
Clickstream Analytics dashboards are designed to provide a holistic view of the user lifecycle: the acquisition, the engagement, the activity, and the retention. In addition, it adds visibility into user devices and geographies. The solution automatically generates visualizations in these six categories: Acquisition, Engagement, Activity, Retention, Devices, and Navigation path. Here are a couple of examples.

The Acquisition dashboard reports the total number of users, the registered number of users (the ones that signed in), and the number of users by traffic source. It also computes the new users and registered users’ trends.

The Engagement dashboard reports the user engagement level (the number of user sessions versus the time users spent on my application). Specifically, I have access to the number of engaged sessions (sessions that last more than 10 seconds or have at least two screen views), the engagement rate (the percentage of engaged sessions from the total number of sessions), and the average engagement time.

The Activity dashboard shows the event and actions taken by my customers in my application. It reports data, such as the number of events and number of views (or screens) shown, with the top events and views shown for a given amount of time.

The Retention tab shows user retention over time: the user stickiness for your daily, weekly, and monthly active users. It also shows the rate of returning users versus new users.

The Device tab shows data about your customer’s devices: operating systems, versions, screen sizes, and language.

And finally, the Path explorer dashboard shows your customers’ navigation path into the screens of your applications.

As I mentioned earlier, all the data are available in Amazon Redshift, so you’re free to build other analytics and dashboards.

Pricing and Availability
The Clickstream Analytics solution is available free of charge. You pay for the AWS services provisioned for you, including Kinesis or Amazon Redshift. Cost estimates depend on the configuration that you select. For example, the size of the Kinesis and Amazon Redshift cluster you select for your data ingestion and analytics needs, or the volume of data your applications send to the pipeline both affect the monthly cost of the solution.

To learn how to get started with this solution, take the Clickstream Analytics workshop today and stop sharing your customer and application clickstream data with third-party solutions.

— seb

Streaming Android games from cloud to mobile with AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 G5g instances

2023-04-13 Sheila Busser

Post Syndicated from Sheila Busser original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/streaming-android-games-from-cloud-to-mobile-with-aws-graviton-based-amazon-ec2-g5g-instances/

This blog post is written by Vincent Wang, GCR EC2 Specialist SA, Compute.

Streaming games from the cloud to mobile devices is an emerging technology that allows less powerful and less expensive devices to play high-quality games with lower battery consumption and less storage capacity. This technology enables a wider audience to enjoy high-end gaming experiences from their existing devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

To load games for streaming on AWS, it’s necessary to use Android environments that can utilize GPU acceleration for graphics rendering and optimize for network latency. Cloud-native products, such as the Anbox Cloud Appliance or Genymotion available on the AWS Marketplace, can provide a cost-effective containerized solution for game streaming workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

For example, Anbox Cloud’s virtual device infrastructure can run games with low latency and high frame rates. When combined with the AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 G5g instances, which offer a cost reduction of up to 30% per-game stream per-hour compared to x86-based GPU instances, it enables companies to serve millions of customers in a cost-efficient manner.

In this post, we chose the Anbox Cloud Appliance to demonstrate how you can use it to stream a resource-demanding game called Genshin Impact. We use a G5g instance along with a mobile phone to run the streamed game inside of a Firefox browser application.

Overview

Graviton-based instances utilize fewer compute resources than x86-based instances due to the 64-bit architecture of Arm processors used in AWS Graviton servers. As shown in the following diagram, Graviton instances eliminate the need for cross-compilation or Android emulation. This simplifies development efforts and reduces time-to-market, thereby lowering the cost-per-stream. With G5g instances, customers can now run their Android games natively, encode CPU or GPU-rendered graphics, and stream the game over the network to multiple mobile devices.

Figure 1: Architecture difference when running Android on X86-based instance and Graviton-based instance.

Real-time ray-traced rendering is required for most modern games to deliver photorealistic objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, and refractions. The G5g instance, which is powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and NVIDIA T4G Tensor Core GPUs, provides a cost-effective solution for running these resource-intensive games.

Architecture

Figure 2: Architecture of Android Streaming Game.

When streaming games from a mobile device, only input data (touchscreen, audio, etc.) is sent over the network to the game streaming server hosted on a G5g instance. Then, the input is directed to the appropriate Android container designated for that particular client. The game application running in the container processes the input and updates the game state accordingly. Then, the resulting rendered image frames are sent back to the mobile device for display on the screen. In certain games, such as multiplayer games, the streaming server must communicate with external game servers to reflect the full game state. In these cases, additional data is transferred to and from game servers and back to the mobile client. The communication between clients and the streaming server is performed using the WebRTC network protocol to minimize latency and make sure that users’ gaming experience isn’t affected.

The Graviton processor handles compute-intensive tasks, such as the Android runtime and I/O transactions on the streaming server. However, for resource-demanding games, the Nvidia GPU is utilized for graphics rendering. To scale effortlessly, the Anbox Cloud software can be utilized to manage and execute several game sessions on the same instance.

Prerequisites

First, you need an Ubuntu single sign-on (SSO) account. If you don’t have one yet, you may create one from Ubuntu One website. Then you need an Android mobile phone with Firefox or Chrome browser installed to play the streaming games.

Setup

We can install Anbox Cloud Appliance in the AWS Marketplace. Select the Arm variant so that it works on Graviton-based instances. If the subscription doesn’t work on the first try, then you receive an email which guides you to a page where you can try again.

Figure 3: Subscribe Anbox Cloud Appliance in AWS Marketplace.

In this demonstration, we select G5g.xlarge in the Instance type section and leave all settings with default values, except the storage as per the following:

A root disk with minimum 50 GB (required)
An additional Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume with at least 100 GB (recommended)

For the Genshin Impact demo, we recommend a specific amount of storage. However, when deploying your Android applications, you must select an appropriate storage size based on the package size. Additionally, you should choose an instance size based on the resources that you plan to utilize for your gaming sessions, such as CPU, memory, and networking. In our demo, we launched only one session from a single mobile device.

Launch the instance and wait until it reaches running status. Then you can secure shell (SSH) to the instance to configure the Android environment.

Install Anbox cloud

To make sure of the security and reliability of some of the package repositories used, we update the CUDA Linux GPG Repository Key. View this Nvidia blog post for more details on this procedure.

$ sudo apt-key del 7fa2af80

$ wget

https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu2004/sbsa/cuda keyring_1.0-1_all.deb

$ sudo dpkg -i cuda-keyring_1.0-1_all.deb

As the Android in Anbox Cloud Appliance is running in an LXD container environment, upgrade LXD to the latest version.

$ sudo snap refresh –channel=5.0/stable lxd

Install the Anbox Cloud Appliance software using the following command and selecting the default answers:

$ sudo anbox-cloud-appliance init

Watch the status page at https://$(ec2_public_DNS_name) for progress information.

Figure 4: The status of deploying Anbox Cloud.

The initialization process takes approximately 20 minutes. After it’s complete, register the Ubuntu SSO account previously created, then follow the instructions provided to finalize the process.

$ anbox-cloud-appliance dashboard register <your Ubuntu SSO email address>

Stream an Android game application

Use the sample from the following repo to setup the service on the streaming server:

$ git clone https://github.com/anbox-cloud/cloud-gaming-demo.git

Build the Flutter web UI:

$ sudo snap install flutter –classic

$ cd cloud-gaming-demo/ui && flutter build web && cd ..

$ mkdir -p backend/service/static

$ cp -av ui/build/web/* backend/service/static

Then build the backend service which processes requests and interacts with the Anbox Stream Gateway to create instances of game applications. Start by preparing the environment:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip

$ sudo pip3 install virtualenv

$ cd backend && virtualenv venv

Create the configuration file for the backend service so that it can access the Anbox Stream Gateway. There are two parameters to set: gateway-URL and gateway-token. The gateway token can be obtained from the following command:

$ anbox-cloud-appliance gateway account create <account-name>

Create a file called config.yaml that contains the two values:

gateway-url: https:// <EC2 public DNS name>

gateway-token: <gateway_token>

Add the following line to the activate hook in the backend/venv/bin/ directory so that the backend service can read config.yaml on its startup:

$ export CONFIG_PATH=<path_to_config_yaml>

Now we can launch the backend service which will be served by default on TCP port 8002.

$./run.sh

In the next steps, we download a game and build it via Anbox Cloud. We need an Android APK and a configuration file. Create a folder under the HOME directory and create a manifest.yaml file in the folder. In this example, we must add the following details in the file. You can refer to the Anbox Cloud documentation for more information on the format.

name: genshin

instance-type: g10.3

resources:

cpus: 10

memory: 25GB

disk-size: 50GB

gpu-slots: 15

features: [“enable_virtual_keyboard”]

Select an APK for the arm64-v8a architecture which is natively supported on Graviton. In this example, we download Genshin Impact, an action role-playing game developed and published by miHoYo. You must supply your own Android APK if you want to try these steps. Download the APK into the folder and rename it to app.apk. Overall, the final layout of the game folder should look as follows:

├── app.apk

└── manifest.yaml

Run the following command from the folder to create the application:

$ amc application create .

Wait until the application status changes to ready. You can monitor the status with the following command:

$ amc application ls

Edit the following:

Update the gameids variable defined in the ui/lib/homepage.dart file to include the name of the game (as declared in the manifest file).
Insert a new key/value pair to the static appNameMap and appDesMap variables defined in the lib/api/application.dart file.
Provide a screenshot of the game (in jpeg format), rename it to <game-name>.jpeg, and put it into the ui/lib/assets directory.

Then, re-build the web UI, copy the contents from the ui/build/web folder to the backend/service/static directory, and refresh the webpage.

Test the game

Using your mobile phone, open the Firefox browser or another browser that supports WebRTC. Type the public DNS name of the G5g instance with the 8002 TCP port, and you should see something similar to the following:

Figure 5: The webpage of the Android streaming game portal.

Select the Play now button, wait a moment for the application to be setup on the server side, and then enjoy the game.

Figure 6: The screen capture of playing Android streaming game.

Clean-up

Please cancel the subscription of the Anbox Cloud Appliance in the AWS Marketplace, you can follow the AWS Marketplace Buyer Guide for more details, then terminate the G5g.xlarge instance to avoid incurring future costs.

Conclusion

In this post, we demonstrated how a resource-intensive Android game runs natively on a Graviton-based G5g instance and is streamed to an Arm-based mobile device. The benefits include better price-performance, reduced development effort, and faster time-to-market. One way to run your games efficiently on the cloud is through software available on the AWS Marketplace, such as the Anbox Cloud Appliance, which was showcased as an example method.

To learn more about AWS Graviton, visit the official product page and the technical guide.

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