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i3D.net powers Dune: Awakening with bare metal cloud

Funcom Logo_i3Dnet customer story

Funcom chooses i3D.net’s FlexMetal to power the launch of its next-generation open world survival game 

Funcom is a veteran open world survival studio with decades of operational experience, backed by parent company Tencent. Their development team is no stranger to the infrastructure demands of live games at scale. But their newest project – Dune: Awakening, a seamless, persistent-world multiplayer on a massive scale built in Unreal Engine, raised the bar for both player experience and backend complexity for the generations to come.  

The game was designed from the ground up to support dynamically stitched multiplayer game maps, and multi-region deployment with rapid rollout. This required a level of infrastructure flexibility, consistency, and performance that typical bare metal providers couldn’t offer.  

After a multi-month rigorous selection process, Funcom chose i3D.net’s Bare Metal Cloud – FlexMetal as a key supplier to operate their launch fleet. More than a year later, they’re now running 2,000+ servers with i3D.net and continue to expand.  

To better understand Funcom’s infrastructure goals and how their platform evolved alongside FlexMetal, we spoke with Michael Søvik, Tools and DevOps Director, and Korbinian Bergauer, Senior Tools Programmer and architect of the orchestration system. Their input helped shape the partnership and contributed to technical improvements on both sides.  

MMO-grade orchestration built on predictable, performant bare metal cloud 

From the start, Funcom’s engineering approach was designed to eliminate guesswork at scale. Rather than rely on abstracted cloud platforms, they opted for a proprietary K8s-based orchestration layer running directly on bare metal. Each server plays a well-defined role: whether part of a multi node battlegroup, a Kubernetes control plane, or a game logic container.  

To support this architecture, Funcom standardized their global fleet on a single 12-core CPU they had already tested extensively in-house. 

“i3D.net provided us with sample hardware early to test our orchestration before going full scale. That saved us a lot of time and headaches.” ​

Funcom

Hardware and scale, delivered fast ​

Funcom’s technical leadership had one clear requirement: consistent, rack-dense, low-power servers, deployed with minimal lead time, hosted in the same physical facility – and i3D.net delivered.  

As the game uses the best and newest hardware in the market, the servers had to be ordered 12 weeks in advance, and installed by i3D.net, before Funcom could place the production order. When the first production order was placed, i3D.net provisioned 600+ servers in under 2 hours in US west region. Globally, i3D.net’s average FlexMetal delivery time is just 8.09 minutes, with a 99.84% average API uptime to match.

“What made us choose i3D.net was the combination of features, experience, and price. i3D.net has launched a lot of games on FlexMetal, and that gave us confidence.”   

Funcom

Today, Dune: Awakening runs primarily on committed capacity, avoiding on-demand scaling for now. But as the game matures, they’re exploring the flexibility that comes with short-term burst workloads.  

“We want to explore scaling down and using on-demand nodes in the future, especially for temporary content and i3D.net would be ideal for that.” 

Funcom

DevOps-native integration, right out of the box 

Funcom’s platform team uses Terraform to provision its infrastructure globally. But they didn’t wait for i3D.net’s Terraform provider to go public, they asked for early access and got it.  

“Your team gave us early access to a Terraform provider before it was even public. We tested with it, found a few issues, and every time we gave feedback, it was fixed quickly. Just the ease of working with your Terraform setup makes you our go-to when we need to spin up a new region quickly.” 

Funcom

Beyond standard automation, Funcom asked for L2 announcements and virtual IP failover support, which not normally found in bare metal platforms.  

“We asked about supporting L2 announcements for high availability, and within a couple of days, i3D.net came back with a working solution. It just works; better than any other provider we tried.” 

Funcom

This customizability helped the team run a resilient architecture while keeping their orchestration logic centralized. 

Anti-DDoS that passes real-world scrutiny 

As a high-profile MMO, Funcom’s infrastructure was subject to threat modeling, third-party validation, and real pre-launch attack simulations. Funcom’s parent company, Tencent, performed network-level tests across multiple providers and i3D.net came out on top.   

Tencent’s network team tested the DDoS protection and told us outright:

"i3D.net has the best solution of any provider we’ve used. We had real problems with other providers, but i3D.net handled it out-of-the-box.” 

Tencent network team

Key reasons:  

  • Protocol-aware filtering that handles game traffic patterns intelligently  
  • Instant mitigation, always-on across all PoPs  
  • No manual whitelisting or delay during attacks  
  • Full transparency through network data sharing  

“We thought we were being attacked at one point, but it turned out it was our own code. Your team helped quickly by sharing the network data so we could figure it out.” 

Tencent network team

Quiet is good  

Funcom’s launch was coordinated through a global virtual war room involving more than 50 engineers, live service partners, and external vendors. However, the room stayed quiet.  

“Honestly, there have been very few issues with i3D.net servers. Things just work with i3D.net. We haven't had to escalate much at all. Zero unknowns. No panic.” 

Funcom

When hardware hiccups occurred, i3D.net rebooted or replaced machines very quickly, often even before Funcom’s monitoring flagged it.  

“i3D.net has been an outstanding partner with excellent stability, DDoS protection, internal networking and support” 

Funcom

Continued support 

With Funcom now running thousands of servers across multiple global regions and preparing for even larger peaks and a future console launch, the collaboration between i3D.net and the studio continues to deepen. Both teams have shown an ongoing commitment to making this partnership work, from hardware customization and Terraform integration, to fine-tuning network performance and staying responsive during live operations. Whether through committed FlexMetal capacity or on-demand infrastructure for future content drops, i3D.net is ready to scale in sync with the game’s evolving needs.  

“From a deployment standpoint, i3D.net is the easiest provider for us to spin up a new region with. Fast, reliable, and things just work. From a cold start in a new region, it took us only 2–3 days to be fully up and running. That’s really fast. Together, we're building more than infrastructure, we are creating a reliable, long-term foundation for one of the most ambitious live service titles out there.”

Funcom
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Funcom Logo_i3Dnet customer story
Company Description
Funcom is a Norwegian video game developer and publisher, founded in 1993, known for online multiplayer games like Anarchy Online and Conan Exiles.
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Video games
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