CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming

Company Overview:
TechStream Gaming is a global multiplayer game developer with 500 employees and $100M annual revenue. They recently launched a hit mobile game that is growing rapidly.

Current Technical Environment:

• On-premises data centers in US and EU.
• 200 bare-metal servers running Linux.
• Self-managed MySQL databases (5 TB total) for player profiles and inventory.
• Peak concurrent users: 2 million.
• Current monthly infrastructure cost: $150K.

Business Requirements:

• Reduce infrastructure costs by 40%.
• Support 5x user growth over 2 years.
• Launch in 3 new regions (APAC, SA, Africa).
• Improve deployment speed from 1 week to daily.

Executive Statements:

• CEO: "We need to scale rapidly to compete. Cloud migration is critical."
• CFO: "Cost reduction is paramount. We cannot exceed $100K/month. ROI must be achieved in 18 months."
• CTO: "Our team has limited cloud experience. Reliability is non-negotiable - 99.95% uptime minimum."

Technical Requirements:

• Sub-100ms latency for players globally.
• Real-time analytics on player behavior.
• Seasonal traffic spikes (5x during holidays).
• CI/CD pipeline for daily deployments.

Constraints:

• Migration must complete in 12 months.
• Cannot exceed 4-hour downtime during cutover.
• Dev team: 20 engineers (Java, MySQL).
• Ops team: 5 engineers (limited cloud experience).

QUESTION:
Which database migration strategy should you recommend to meet the global scalability and latency requirements while minimizing operational overhead for the ops team?