Steam’s network facilities are impressive

Being a giant on the digital distribution market, Valve must really take care of its network infrastructure, because it is thanks to it that we can log into Steam without any delays. It is invisible to us, and the understanding of it is not really needed to play, but the company decided to unveil the secret in its summary of 2018.

According to the information provided, Steam’s network backend makes a huge impression, because only in 2018 Valve took care of expanding Solr servers and launching new SQL servers. For the unfamiliar, this is probably black magic, but it boils down to the fact that the former have improved the search in the store and viewing user reviews and the Steam workshop. In turn, the latter support earlier systems managing mainly Steam inventory. It was there that disks with a capacity of 2.7 petabytes had to deal with issuing 1.7 billion trading cards, handling 488 million exchanges, 245 million created emoticons and handling 218 million screenshots posted in the community tab. Valve also took care of a much better backup that will protect Steam when “a meteor hits our data center.”

But that’s not all, as Valve continues to expand its private global network, which already includes more than 28,000 regional and local networks. This segment, in turn, is responsible for distributing games and maintaining servers (eg CS: GO) to players from 229 countries. Currently, the maximum bandwidth of this network is as high as 1 Tb / s, which makes it easy to believe the bragging about sending 15 billion GB of data in 2018. By the way, all network traffic in 2003 was (or at least that’s the estimate) of 9.3 billion GB. Valve also tried to improve the security of HTTPS sites, generous remuneration for the new 2,300 partners and 1,668 Steam Workshop contributors.

Also read: Valve announced a refreshing Steam look

Źródło: Valve