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Cloud game development: CI/CD - Games Industry Lens

Cloud game development: CI/CD

CI/CD infrastructure is important when developing games regardless of team size to improve iteration times, build reliability, efficient deployment, and better control over the development and release process to deliver a high-quality game experience to players. A game development CI/CD pipeline is typically comprised of highly available source control servers and storage, compute resources to run your builds, and software to perform automated testing, along with the proper network connectivity from your development machines. The following reference architecture demonstrates how to offload game builds from remote or on-premises game development environments to the AWS Cloud to aid developers in migrating or building new build farms.

Offload game builds to the cloud

Offload game builds to the cloud

  1. AWS Direct Connect provides a low latency, private, dedicated connection to AWS for in-office developers. Remote developers use zero-trust technologies like AWS Verified Access, or virtual private networks (VPN) like AWS Client VPN.

  2. AWS Transit Gateway simplifies network management for connectivity between VPCs and from on-premises networks.

  3. Perforce manages source and version control (CI) backed by Amazon EBS storage for quickly accessed, persistent data. Perforce Helix Core is available in the AWS Marketplace.

  4. Commits start a build (CD) in Jenkins when developers push changes to Perforce tied to a branch. Perforce initiates POST a JSON payload to Jenkins. The Jenkins controller calls engine headless CLI commands to run and parallelize the build process across ephemeral, Docker nodes (such as Amazon EC2 Spot Instances or Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances). Developers can increase availability by using two Jenkins controllers, one in each Availability Zone, behind a load balancer. For some game engines, developers might need additional licensing infrastructure configured in additional subnets to vend licenses for the build context each time a concurrent build is run.

  5. The Xcode portion of iOS builds is offloaded to Amazon EC2 Mac instances to sign, build, and export the .IPA file, splitting the process and reducing build times. AWS Secrets Manager holds provisioning profiles, private keys, and certificates.

  6. Build artifacts are delivered to Amazon S3, which sends notifications of success or failure. AWS Device Farm enables automated testing for mobile devices.