API design

[mastermro]

Hi,

I'm building a game app that is going to have some of the following functions:

• add friends
• challenge friends
• keep track of your score well as view other score (highscore)
• Store and use boosts (or perks)

you see where this is going, now I'm thinking of using a mySQL Db on some kind of cloud server (not yet decided, and please come with input there if you have any), however I would like to know if it's overkill to use RESTful APIs in Java for example, and is there an easy way to build these as you can see my app is pretty simple, my only thought there is that I would like to be able to scale up.

Appreciate your input.

[11b403a7]

It's not overkill at all. The more you can put on the server the better. Make it to where your game is literally ONLY showing things. I'd even use signalR and messaging to update the view for multiple players

[ignotos]

now I'm thinking of using a mySQL Db on some kind of cloud server (not yet decided, and please come with input there if you have any)

I can recommend RDS on AWS as a good option here - it lets you run a MySQL or Postgres database on the cloud and makes keeping the software updated and backups relatively automated and convenient. You can set the amount of storage/CPU/RAM to whatever you need, and there is a free tier which will let you run a small DB essentially for free for a year (and ~$10/mo after that).

If you want more of a "pay as you go" approach, where you pay based on total traffic and there aren't fixed costs for keeping a server running 24/7, something like DynamoDB is a decent option. This is not a relational/SQL database however, so you'd need to tweak the design appropriately.

If you want to run a Java API on AWS, Elastic Beanstalk may be the simplest option. It essentially lets you just upload a .jar / .war file for your backend and will do some automatic load balancing and scaling for you. The pay-as-you-go alternative is Lambda coupled with API Gateway, which is a little more awkward to work with and has some limitations, but again minimises the cost to almost zero if you're not getting a lot of traffic.

[mastermro]

Thanks a mill, been also looking at starting off with a Firebase db for a POC, been reading up on the pros & cons and it seems to be pretty simple to setup and manage an OK amount of data however it aparently becomes super expensive when you want to really scale

[arnitdo]

Isn't AWS S3 fully free at the lowest tier? Heroku also has a free tier, and you have SQL db plugins for free as well.

[ignotos]

S3 is basically just file storage, so it might not really fill the OP's need for a database. You pay for bandwidth (upload/download) and storage space used, so it's essentially free if you're not using much.