Tamagotchi Uni Uses AWS, Amazon Web Services
The Tamagotchi Uni is the first Tamagotchi to ever connect to Wi-Fi, which enables it to receive over the area updates, programing changes, and more. How exactly is this all being done by Bandai Japan? Well Bandai has built the Tamagotchi Uni on the Amazon Web Services platform (AWS).
The details of this are actually outlined on a recent article on the Amazon Web Services blog. The blog post provided a detailed view on how Tamagotchi Uni use AWS to achieve secure and reliable connectivity and quickly deliver new content updates without leaving customers waiting.It details that Bandai Co., Ltd., the company responsible for product development and sales, adopted AWS IoT to realize the concept of globally interconnected Tamagotchi, enabling users to interact with each other.
Bandai partnered with their cloud development partner, Phoenisys, Inc., to connect and manage million of Tamagotchi devices. One of the critical features was the over the air software updates which uses the jobs feature of AWS IoT Device Management to distribute the latest firmware across all Tamagotchi devices without causing any delays to customers.
To make Tamagotchi Uni IoT-enabled, Bandai establish the three key goals, which was implementing secure connections, scaling the load-balancing resources to accommodate over 1 million connections worldwide, and optimizing operational costs. The article even features the AWS architecture for the Tamagotchi Uni, which is interesting.
AWS IoT Core is used to manage the state of each Tamagotchi Uni device, which helps retrieve distributed items and content. AWS IoT Device Management is used to index the extensive Tamagotchi Uni fleet and create dynamic groups on the state of each device, facilitating efficient over-the-air (OTA) updates. FreeRTOS is used to minimize the amount of resources and code required to implement device-to-cloud communication for efficient system development. AWS Lambda is used to process tasks, delivering new announcements, and registering assets. Amazon DynamoDB is used as a fully managed, sever less, key-value noSQL database that runs high-performance applications at any scale. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used for object storage service, each of these data stores are used to manage the various resources within Tamagotchi Uni. Lastly, Amazon Timestream is used to accumulate historical data of user’s actions like downloading items and additional content.
The article also details how Bandai is handling large scale firmware updates to Tamagotchi Uni devices which are executed at a rate of 1,000 units per hour which would have resulted in a delay for some devices. The team actually designed job delivery as a continuous job which automatically updates the devices under certain conditions. This is using fleet indexing that runs a query to see which devices meet the criteria for the update to be pushed out to it.
Lastly the article details how Bandai conducted system performance testing at a large-scale to emulate what it would be like after the device was released. They verified the smooth operation and performance of updates through their testing.
Be sure to check out the full article here on the Amazon AWS blog.













