When developers design mobile games or web-based video games, they have to deliver heavy assets like high-resolution graphics, JavaScript engines, audio files, and video files to millions of users simultaneously. Studios like (the creators of Candy Crush) rely heavily on the Amazon CloudFront API to scale game content globally to hundreds of countries without lag.
: Players take turns drawing lines between dots to complete squares. : A classic word-guessing game for two players. Tic-Tac-Toe
Several popular online games utilize Cloudfront.net, including:
By serving game content from a location geographically closer to the player, it significantly reduces loading times and reduces lag.
Because CloudFront is a legitimate Amazon service, the infrastructure itself is entirely safe and highly secure. However, because anyone with an AWS account can use CloudFront to distribute content, bad actors occasionally exploit it.
If you want, I can help you understand: How to configure CloudFront for static asset caching
Elias typed a query. "North America is green. Europe is green. Asia-Pac is... wait."
Then, the status flipped to Deployed .
: Relies on the network to serve Candy Crush Saga and other titles across 200+ countries.
This article provides a deep dive into the dual nature of "cloudfrontnet games." It explores why games hosted on *.cloudfront.net subdomains are so popular for evading network blocks, how major studios like King use the infrastructure to serve millions of players, and how the network minimizes game latency. The Architecture: What is a CloudFront.net Game?
With a deep breath, I bypassed the local DNS, tunneled through three old Tor bridges, and typed the address. My screen flickered. Then, a black page loaded. No CSS. No JavaScript. Just a single line of Courier New text:
This page explains how to transfer data to/from your Google Cloud Storage (GCS) Buckets with a terminal. You can use the methods on this page for all GCS Buckets, whether you created them on the ACTIVATE platform or outside the platform.
To transfer data to/from GCS Bucket storage, you’ll use the Google Cloud Command-Line Interface (CLI), gcloud.
Gcloud is pre-installed on cloud clusters provisioned by ACTIVATE, so you can enter commands directly into the IDE after logging in to the controller of an active Google cluster.
If you’re transferring data between GCS Buckets and your local machine or an on-premises cluster, you’ll likely need to install gcloud first.
Check for gcloud
Open a terminal and navigate to your data’s destination. Enter which gcloud.
If gcloud is installed, you’ll see a message that shows its location, such as /usr/local/bin/gcloud. Otherwise, you’ll see a message such as /usr/bin/which: no gcloud or gcloud not found.
Install gcloud
To install gcloud, we recommend following the Google installation guide, which includes OS-specific instructions for Linux, macOS, and Windows as well as troubleshooting tips.
About `gsutil`
Google refers to gsutil commands as a legacy feature that is minimally maintained; instead, they recommend using gcloud commands. For this reason, we've used gcloud in this guide. Please see this page for Google's gsutil guide.
Export Your Google Credentials
You can see our page Obtaining Credentials for information on finding your Google credentials.
In your terminal, enter export BUCKET_NAME=gs:// with your Bucket’s name after the backslashes.
Next, enter export CLOUDSDK_AUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN='_____' with your Google access token in the blank space.
Note
Please be sure to include the quotes on both ends of your access token. There are characters inside Google tokens that, without quotation marks, systems will try to read as commands.
List Files in a GCS Bucket
In your terminal, enter gcloud storage ls gs://$BUCKET_NAME to display the files in your Bucket. For this guide, we used a small text file named test.txt, so our command returned this message:
demo@pw-user-demo:~/pw$ gcloud storage ls gs://$BUCKET_NAMEgs://pw-bucket/test.txt/
If your Bucket is empty, this gcloud storage ls command will not print anything.
Transfer a File To/From a GCS Bucket
gcloud mimics the Linux cp command for transferring files. To transfer a file, enter gcloud storage cp SOURCE DESTINATION in your terminal.
Below is an example of the gcloud storage cp command:
In your terminal, enter gcloud storage cp gs://$BUCKET_NAME/file/in/bucket.txt fileName.txt to copy a remote file to your current directory. You’ll see this message:
To download a file from GCS storage to a specific directory, enter its absolute or relative path (e.g., /home/username/ or ./dir_relative_to_current_dir) in place of ./ with the gcloud storage cp command.
To upload, simply reverse the order of SOURCE and DESTINATION in the gcloud storage cp command.
Delete a File From a GCS Bucket
In your terminal, enter gcloud storage rm gs://$BUCKET_NAME/file_name to delete a file. You’ll see this message: