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By Samsung Newsroom
What is Samsung Account?
Samsung Account is an account service that brings together more than 60 services and applications in 256 countries with over 1.7 billion user accounts. It is used for Samsung Electronics services including Samsung Pay, SmartThings, and Samsung Health, as well as for authentication on various devices such as mobile, wearable, TV, PC, etc. Samsung Account helps deliver a secure and reliable customer experience with one account on a variety of contact points from online stores (such as samsung.com) and offline stores to our customer services.
Evolution of Current Samsung Account Architecture
As the number of user accounts and connected services has grown, the infrastructure and service of Samsung Account has also evolved. It switched to the AWS-based cloud for service stability and efficiency in 2019, and is currently servicing 4 regions: 3 global regions (EU, US, AP) and China.
Currently, Samsung Account consists of more than 70 microservices. In 2022, Samsung Account switched to the Kubernetes base in order to reliably support Microservices Architecture (MSA). Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration platform that supports the easy deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. In 2023, Samsung Account reinforced disaster recovery (DR) to be able to provide failover across global regions, and expanded the AP region to improve user experience.
In other words, Samsung Account has repeatedly evolved its infrastructure and services, and is currently running stably with traffic over 2.7 million requests per second (RPS) and over 200K DB transactions per second (TPS).
Each AWS-based Samsung Account region, with its own virtual private cloud, (VPC) is accessible through user devices, server-to-server, or the web. In particular, the web access provides a variety of features such as samsung.com and TV QR login on AWS CloudFront, a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Samsung Account microservices are being serviced on containers within Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters, and internal communication between regions uses VPC peering.
Samsung Account is using several managed services from AWS to deliver various features. It is using Aurora, DynamoDB, and Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) as storage to build data sync between regions, and it provides account services based on different managed services including ElastiCache, Pinpoint, and Simple Queue Service (SQS).
Let's elaborate on the AWS Managed Services that Samsung Account uses. The first is EKS, which is a Kubernetes service for running over 70 microservices on MSA. Next, Aurora is used to save and query data as an RDB and DynamoDB does the same but as a NoSQL database. Along with them, ElastiCache (Redis OSS) is used to manage cache and sessions and MSK handles delivering events from integrated services and data sync. If you’re building an AWS-based service yourself, you would probably use these managed services as well.
Frustrating Upgrades Contrasting the Convenience of Managed Services
There is a major challenge to consider when you use these managed services, though. End of support comes, on average, after 1.5 years for EKS and 2 years for Aurora. Various other services like ElastiCache and MSK face the same problem. Such service support termination is natural for AWS, but upgrading these services when support ceases is often a painful task for those running them. Because operation resources are often reduced upon switching to the cloud, large-scale upgrades that come around every 1 or 2 years have to be performed without enough resources for emergency response.
These managed service upgrades put a major burden on Samsung Account. More than 60 integrated services have to be upgraded without causing interruptions, and the upgrades must be rolled out across a total of 4 regions. On top of that, Samsung Account is developing and running more than 70 microservices, so a significant amount of support and cooperation from development teams is required. The most challenging of all is that the upgrades need to be performed while dealing with traffic of over 2.7M RPS and DB traffic of 200K TPS.
EKS Upgrade Sequence and Restrictions
You might think upgrading EKS on AWS is easy. In general, when upgrading EKS, you start with the control plane including etcd and the APIs that manage EKS. Afterwards, you move to the data plane where the actual service pods are on, and finally to EKS add-ons. In theory, it is possible to upgrade EKS following this sequence without any impact to the service operation.
However, there are restrictions to general EKS upgrades. If an upgrade fails in any of the 3 steps above due to missing EKS API specs or incompatibility issues, a rollback is not available at all. In addition, it is difficult to do a compatibility check for the services and add-ons in advance.
Multi-cluster Architecture for Non-disruptive EKS Upgrades
After much thought, Samsung Account decided to go with a simple but reliable option to perform EKS upgrades. It's possible that many other services are using a similar way to upgrade EKS or run actual services.
Samsung Account chose to upgrade EKS based on a multi-cluster architecture with 2 EKS clusters. The architecture is built to enable an existing EKS version to continue providing the service, while a new EKS version on a separate cluster performs a compatibility validation with various microservices and add-ons before receiving traffic.
The advantage of this method is that you can implement a rollback plan where the old EKS version takes over the traffic if any issues occur when switching to the new EKS version. A lesson we have learned from providing the Samsung Account service under high traffic is that there will be issues when you actually start processing traffic, no matter how perfectly you've built your infrastructure or service. For these reasons, it is essential to have a rollback plan in place whenever you deploy a service or upgrade your infrastructure.
When you perform a multi-cluster upgrade, traffic must be switched between the old and new EKS clusters. Simply put, there are 2 main approaches. One approach is to switch traffic by placing a proxy server between the 2 clusters. The other approach is to switch the target IP using DNS. Needless to say, there may be a variety of other ways to accomplish this.
In the first option, using a proxy server, you may encounter overload issues when handling high-volume traffic, such as with Samsung Account. Additionally, there are too many Application Load Balancers (ALBs) used for approximately 70 microservices, making it impractical to create a proxy server for each ALB.
In the second option, using DNS, the actual user, client, and server replace the service IP of the old EKS with that of the new EKS during a DNS lookup, redirecting requests to a different target at the user level. The DNS option does not require a proxy server, and switching traffic is easy by simply editing the DNS record. However, there is a risk that the traffic switch might not happen immediately due to propagation-related delays with DNS.
The DNS-based traffic switch architecture was applied to achieve a non-disruptive EKS upgrade for Samsung Account.
Let us describe the DNS layers of Samsung Account with a hypothetical example. The top domain is account.samsung.com, and there are 3 global region domains under it, classified based on latency or geolocation. For us.account.samsung.com, the layers are split into service.us-old-eks.a.s.com and service.us-new-eks.a.s.com, representing the old and new domains. This is a simple, hypothetical example. In reality, Samsung Account uses more DNS layers. During the recent EKS upgrade, we switched traffic between the internal domains of the 2 EKS clusters based on weighted records while adjusting the ratio, rather than switching all at once. For instance, when a user sends a request to account.samsung.com, it goes through us.account.samsung.com, and the actual EKS service IP is applied at the end based on the specified weight.
Retrospective of the Non-disruptive EKS Upgrade
In summary, I would say "it's a successful upgrade if the connected services haven't noticed." With this EKS upgrade, we deployed and switched traffic for a total of 3 regions, 6 EKS clusters, and more than 210 microservices over the course of one month. The traffic switch was conducted with ratios set based on each service's load and characteristics, and no issues with connected services were reported during this one month EKS upgrade.
Of course, as they say, "it's not over until it's over." We did have a minor incident where there were insufficient internal IPs in the internal subnet due to many EKS nodes and service pods becoming active simultaneously, which scared us for a moment. We secured the IP resources by reducing the number of pods for Kubelet and add-ons by about a thousand and quickly scaling up the EKS nodes. One thing we realized while switching traffic with DNS is that 99.9% of the entire traffic can be switched within 5 minutes when the DNS weight is adjusted.
Closing Note
Richard Branson, co-founder of Virgin Group, once said, "You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over." Samsung Account has been growing and evolving, addressing many bumps along the way. We continue to resolve various challenges with the stability of our service as the priority, keeping this "learning while falling over" spirit in mind. Thank you.
View the full blog at its source
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By Alex
Samsung was one of the first major smartphone makers to jump on the smartwatch ship, and, unsurprisingly, its first smartwatch didn’t use Google’s nascent Android Wear back then. It struck off on its own with a customized version of Android running inside the Samsung Galaxy Gear. It has come full circle and has returned to Android again, this time with Wear OS running on the upcoming Galaxy Watch 4 series. Surprisingly, there might still be some owners of the Galaxy Gear around, and Samsung is now urging them to switch to its Tizen OS if they want access to some smartwatch apps.
The Galaxy Gear launched way back in 2013 and was the only one of its kind, so it’s rather surprising to hear that Samsung still has the smartwatch and its users in mind eight years after. Even more surprising is that Samsung was actually still running a version of its app store specifically for that Android-based OS after all this time. Samsung is shutting that down next month, however, but it hasn’t abandoned owners of the smartwatch just yet (another surprise).
Samsung actually gave Galaxy Gear owners a way forward back in 2014 when it was clear that it wasn’t going to stick to its own Android smartwatch OS. Back then, it offered an update to its new Tizen-based wearable platform, the very same OS that would take Samsung’s smartwatches to relative success for a couple of years. Apparently, not everyone took the opportunity back then, but Samsung is now pretty much forcing their hand.
An update to the Samsung Galaxy Store notifies owners of the smartwatch that it will be shutting down the Galaxy Store for Galaxy Gear devices on August 5, 2021. While the smartwatch will continue to function, users won’t be able to install or reinstall apps after that date. They can upgrade to Tizen moving forward if they want access to apps, but it’s a one-way street and there’s no turning back. Moreover, not all Galaxy Gear apps will be available on Tizen, but there might be similar ones by now.
It is rather impressive that Samsung has apparently managed to support a relatively obscure 2013 smartwatch for this long. Unfortunately, the same story can’t be said for more recent Tizen-based smartwatches that may be blocked from upgrading to the new Samsung-branded Wear OS. Whether that’s because of hardware requirements or some arbitrary policy from Google remains a mystery.
Source: https://www.slashgear.com/galaxy-gear-owners-must-upgrade-to-tizen-or-lose-galaxy-store-access-05681014/
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By Samsung Newsroom
Anti-Aliasing is an important addition to any game to improve visual quality by smoothing out the jagged edges of a scene. MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing) is one of the oldest methods to achieve this and is still the preferred solution for mobile. However it is only suitable for forward rendering and, with mobile performance improving year over year, deferred rendering is becoming more common, necessitating the use of post-process AA. This leaves slim pickings as such algorithms tend to be too expensive for mobile GPUs with FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing) being the only ‘cheap’ option among them. FXAA may be performant enough but it only has simple colour discontinuity shape detection, leading to an often unwanted softening of the image. Its kernel is also limited in size, so it struggles to anti-alias longer edges effectively.
Space Module scene with CMAA applied.
Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing
Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing (CMAA) is a post-process AA solution originally developed by Intel for their low power integrated GPUs 1. Its design goals are to be a better alternative to FXAA by:
Being minimally invasive so it can be acceptable as a replacement in a wide range of applications, including worst case scenarios such as text, repeating patterns, certain geometries (power lines, mesh fences, foliage), and moving images. Running efficiently on low-medium range GPU hardware, such as integrated GPUs (or, in our case, mobile GPUs). We have repurposed this desktop-developed algorithm and come up with a hybrid between the original 1.3 version and the updated 2.0 version 2 to make the best use of mobile hardware. A demo app was created using Khronos’ Vulkan Samples as a framework (which could also be done with GLES) to implement this experiment. The sample has a drop down menu for easy switching between the different AA solutions and presents a frametime and bandwidth overlay.
CMAA has four basic logical steps:
Image analysis for colour discontinuities (afterwards stored in a local compressed 'edge' buffer). The method used is not unique to CMAA. Extracting locally dominant edges with a small kernel. (Unique variation of existing algorithms.) Handling of simple shapes. Handling of symmetrical long edge shapes. (Unique take on the original MLAA shape handling algorithm.) Pass 1
Edge detection result captured in Renderdoc.
A full screen edge detection pass is done in a fragment shader and the resulting colour discontinuity values are written into a colour attachment. Our implementation uses the pixels’ luminance values to find edge discontinuities for speed and simplicity. An edge exists if the contrast between neighbouring pixels is above an empirically determined threshold.
Pass 2
Neighbouring edges considered for local contrast adaptation.
A local contrast adaptation is performed for each detected edge by comparing the value of the previous pass against the values of its closest neighbours by creating a threshold from the average and largest of these, as described by the formula below. Any that pass the threshold are written into an image as a confirmed edge.
Pass 3
This pass collects all the edges for each pixel from the previous pass and packs them into a new image for the final pass. This pass also does the first part of edge blending. The detected edges are used to look for 2, 3 and 4 edges in a pixel and then blend in the colours from the adjacent pixels. This helps avoid the unnecessary blending of straight edges.
Pass 4
The final pass does long edge blending by identifying Z-shapes in the detected edges. For each detected Z-shape, the length of the edge is traced in both directions until it reaches the end or until it runs into a perpendicular edge. Pixel blending is then performed along the traced edges proportional to their distance from the centre.
Before and after of Z-shape detection.
Results
Image comparison shows a typical scenario for AA. CMAA manages high quality anti-aliasing while retaining sharpness on straight edges.
CMAA demonstrates itself as a superior solution to aliasing than FXAA by avoiding the latter’s limitations. It maintains a crisper look to the overall image and won’t smudge thin lines, all while still providing effective anti-aliasing to curved edges. It also provides a significant performance advantage to Qualcomm devices and only a small penalty to ARM.
Image comparison shows a weakness of FXAA where it smudges thin lined geometry into the background. CMAA shows no such weakness and retains the colour of the railing while adding anti-aliasing effectively.
MSAA is still a clear winner and our recommended solution if your game allows for it to be resolved within a single render pass. For any case where that is impractical, CMAA is overall a better alternative than FXAA and should be strongly considered.
Graph shows the increase in frametime for each AA method across a range of Samsung devices.
References
Filip Strugar and Leigh Davies: Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing (CMAA) – March 2014. Filip Strugar and Adam T Lake: Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing 2.0 – April 2018. View the full blog at its source
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By Samsung Newsroom
Spring is here and it’s a good time to clean house in your digital world. From your design process to Galaxy Store presence, it’s important to think about changes that could make things more efficient. To help you get started, members of the Samsung Developers community have been sharing advice on how they’ve successfully refined their processes and their Galaxy Store presence.
We continue our series with Tan Nguyen from butterfly-effected, GmbH. A themes and watch faces designer, butterfly-effected has a long history with Samsung, having provided content for our first mobile content store, the Samsung Funclub. Read on to learn about Tan’s process for quality control that allows him to grow, while keeping their designs fresh.
How did you get into designing themes and watch faces?
Since 2006, we’ve been working with Samsung in different areas. For the UEFA Euro 2016 Football Championship, Samsung planned a promotion and asked us if we could create some themes for them. We were amazed at the number of downloads and created more. After seeing amazing results again, we continued designing more. That´s basically how everything started.
Has your design approach evolved over time?
Our process begins with collecting ideas, sketching and then selecting the best ones for production. Then we do extensive Q&A on the design and the technical part (e.g. are the colors visible in all combinations?). If everything passes, we send them to our partners for their approval before we upload them to the store.
In the past, we spent a lot of time on the technical part, because everything was new. Now we have more experience and the tools have matured, so we can focus more on the creative part and design. The Samsung Galaxy Themes Studio editor has an integrated visibility check that is a helpful tool when finalizing designs.
Geometric Perspective by butterfly-effected, GmbH
Do you have a system in place to organize your designs and the way you present them?
We created our own system to keep track of all the designs, designers, tasks, sales and revenue share for our brands. In addition to Galaxy Store, we use social media, mainly Facebook, to present new products to customers and fans.
How often do you revisit your old designs and update them?
We take the most downloaded designs (even the free ones) and update them on a regular basis. Time is allocated for that, and we update as many as possible without affecting the production of new themes. Some themes have more sales after the update, others do not. But in general, there is an increase, so it makes sense to revisit older designs — especially since products without an update tend to experience a drop in sales.
Black Fiber by butterfly-effected, GmbH
When new platforms are released, do you check to make sure all designs are working?
When a new platform is released, there are usually many different firmware versions. This can make the creation and the Q&A process quite complex if the tester’s firmware, Remote Test Lab (RTL) and our phones show different things.
We always prioritize checking on products with higher downloads. We use RTL when new issues arise (e.g. color combinations) that we can´t reproduce or fix in Galaxy Themes Studio.
What advice would you give a designer about organizing and maintaining their work?
Backup all source files and keep a file with all the layers. Also, it is helpful to use version control software to not lose track of supported devices and firmware.
Thanks to Tan for sharing helpful advice on improving the Q&A process and prioritizing updates to keep designs fresh. You can connect with Tan and butterfly-effected, GmbH on their Facebook Themes Page and Facebook Watch Faces Page. You can also check out butterfly-effected’s full collection of designs in Galaxy Store.
We hope this post helps you start your spring refresh for success. Remember, making Galaxy Store updates is key to keeping your seller account active. You need two activities every three months that trigger an app review by the seller portal team. An activity takes many forms, and can be anything from uploading a new app, to updating a current app, or changing the description or adding/updating photos. However, changing the price of an app does not count.
Stay tuned next week for the final installment in our ‘Refresh for Success’ series and follow us on Twitter at @samsung_dev for our latest updates.
View the full blog at its source
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