Wave

About Wave
Wave is a virtual entertainment company that enables artists and fans to collaborate in the creation of the most interactive live performance experiences in the world. Wave combines the best of live music, gaming, and broadcast technology to transform live music performances into immersive virtual experiences viewed across popular social and gaming platforms including YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook and Roblox. To date, Waves have been attended by millions of fans worldwide and the company has hosted more than 50 Waves for a number of popstars, DJs and artists including Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Calvin Harris, John Legend, Dillon Francis, Pentakill, Alison Wonderland, Tinashe, Imogen Heap, REZZ, Galantis, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lindsey Stirling.

The challenge

Wave’s code builds took over 180 minutes (approximately three hours) to complete, meaning that teams couldn’t iterate fast enough if issues were detected. As a 100% remote company, the company started exploring a move to the cloud but found that costs were significant and that acceleration was limited without extra help.

How Incredibuild helped – The ability to boost performance and slash cost when developing on the cloud

Wave started using Incredibuild for Cloud to accelerate its Unreal Engine and TeamCity builds – two major bottlenecks in their development process. Using Incredibuild’s distribution technology, The team was able to shorten build times by nearly 80% for UE4 (from three hours to roughly 30 minutes) and by more than 70% on regular (non-UE4) builds. Alongside the massive acceleration, Incredibuild had optimized Wave’s consumption on AWS by 44% by utilizing spot machines to execute the workload as well as running a fully automated scale-up/down orchestration, which eliminated over-provisioning and idle CPUs.

As a result, Wave’s developer teams were able to significantly accelerate their iteration frequency and create more immersive experiences and better engagement for their virtual concerts and events.

The ability to launch Incredibuild directly via AWS Marketplace meant Wave developers were up and running within hours, without requiring any change to code, tools, or processes. According to Wave VP of Engineering, Bill Mauer, “The offer of having an AWS Marketplace option saved our DevOps team from building out the infrastructure and allowed us to cut our clean builds down by over 80%.  On non-engine clean builds, our more common build, went down over 75%.”

Bottom line

By adding Incredibuild for Cloud into their AWS environment, Wave was able to quickly enhance productivity, boost iteration frequency, and cut down build times from three hours to 30 minutes in a matter of days.