Amazon GameLift Servers managed container fleets
Amazon GameLift Servers managed container fleets offer a cloud-based platform for hosting your containerized game server software. With a container fleet, you get the flexibility, security, and reliability of AWS Cloud resources, which are further optimized for multiplayer game hosting. The Amazon GameLift Servers service provides robust host management tooling.
Speed up onboarding with these tools for managed containers:
-
The containers starter kit
streamlines integration and fleet setup. It adds essential game session management features to your game server, and uses pre-configured templates to build a container fleet and an automated deployment pipeline for your game server. After deployment, use the Amazon GameLift Servers console and API tools to monitor fleet performance, manage game sessions, and analyze metrics. -
For Unreal Engine or Unity developers, use the game engine Amazon GameLift Servers plugins and server SDKs
to integrate your game server and build a container fleet from inside your game engine's development environment. The plugin's guided workflows help you create a fast, simple solution with cloud-based hosting using managed containers. You can build on this foundation to create a custom hosting solution for your game.
A managed container fleet is made up of a set of virtual computes that Amazon GameLift Servers owns and operates on your behalf and based on your configuration choices. Computes are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with the Amazon GameLift Servers Linux operating system. Instances are physically located in AWS Regions or Local Zones. When you create a container fleet, you choose an EC2 instance type for your computes based on computing power, memory, storage, networking capabilities, and other factors.
For a managed container fleet, you store Linux-based container images in an Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) repository and create a container group definition to describe your container architecture. When you create a fleet, the Amazon GameLift Servers service uses the container group definition to deploy your container images to fleet instances. As containers launch game server processes, each process establishes a connection to the Amazon GameLift Servers service and reports readiness to host a game session.
In addition to fleet deployment, Amazon GameLift Servers handles the following host management tasks so you don't have to:
-
Tracks the status of all containers in the fleet and replaces stale or unhealthy ones.
-
Handles authentication for communication between server processes and the Amazon GameLift Servers service.
-
Offers auto-scaling tools that adjust fleet capacity dynamically to meet player demand.
-
Reports performance metrics for the fleet's EC2 instances, containers, and server processes.
See these topics about how to set up and maintain managed container fleets:
