Immersive Simulation on Google Cloud

“Our multi-cloud approach made it impossible to build a unified data platform. Bringing everything over to Google Cloud with Sakura Sky solved that.”

Orbx produces high-fidelity simulated environments, ranging from detailed flight simulations over Brisbane to the prehistoric landscapes of Jurassic World: Archipelago. Supporting worlds at that scale demands infrastructure that holds together under extreme, peaky, real-time load. Sakura Sky’s Cloud practice re-engineered Orbx’s environment to do exactly that, and the work was featured as an official Google Cloud Platform case study.

The Challenge

By early 2024, Orbx’s infrastructure was fractured across a multi-cloud and on-premises environment. The split prevented cross-platform queries, created restrictive data silos, and made it impossible to scale reliably ahead of major product launches. The team needed a single platform that could grow with the simulated worlds they ship.

The Engineering

We re-architected Orbx’s environment as a single cloud-native platform on Google Cloud, with three engineering commitments that shaped every downstream decision:

• Infrastructure as Code from day one. Every deployment is defined in code and rolled through automated pipelines. No manual production changes. Rapid, repeatable, reviewable updates.
• Elastic compute under live load. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) scales compute in real time against player demand, so launch-day traffic does not require pre-provisioning capacity that sits idle the rest of the quarter.
• Real-time data at simulation scale. A high-throughput pipeline ingests positional data streams from the live worlds into Cloud Bigtable and Cloud SQL, sized for the precision Orbx’s simulations demand.

The pattern under all three is the same one we apply across Cloud engagements: governance and reliability engineered into the substrate, not bolted on after launch.

The Results

The migration to a unified Google Cloud platform delivered measurable improvements across every key operational metric:

• Velocity: 400% increase in release velocity, moving from irregular deployment windows to continuous updates.
• Efficiency: 30% reduction in total cloud expenditure through consolidated billing and automated resource scaling.
• Reliability: 99.99% uptime, maintaining player trust for live-service titles.
• Precision: 10x improvement in map update precision, from 10-second intervals down to 1 second.

This engagement is the kind of work our Accelerate solution exists to deliver: focused sprints that put production-ready cloud, data, or security capability into the client’s environment, jointly built with their team. Contact us to scope a similar engagement.