Design principles
In addition to the design principles in the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper, the following design principles can achieve performance efficiency for your games:
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Measure game performance from end-to-end: It is important to measure performance as it is perceived from the perspective of your players. This means you should measure the performance of the game client, your game infrastructure, and the internet connectivity that connects your players to the infrastructure. This will assist in understanding where you can make performance improvements within your architecture.
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Optimize your architecture to improve metrics that reflect actual player experience: As you adapt and evolve your architecture over time, think about how these improvements and changes will impact player experience. Games workloads should be able to withstand and minimize the impact of failures to block widespread disruptions to gameplay. Game features and systems that aren't critically dependent on each other should be de-coupled to reduce the blast radius of failures and isolate player impacting issues.
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Use technologies that simplify game operations and increase development speed: Prioritize the adoption of technologies that can improve developer efficiency. Operational overhead during pre-production stages of development can be a distraction from improving gameplay. By leveraging managed services from AWS or AWS Partners, engineering can be reduced, which enables game developers to focus on the core game loop and player experience. Architecture and performance requirements may change and evolve throughout the game development life cycle and technology trade-offs should be considered at each phase.
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Design infrastructure to meet peak player concurrency and dynamically scale as needed: Infrastructure should be designed to scale to meet player demand. Metrics, such as player session concurrency and number of logins, can be used to preemptively scale before systems become overloaded. Reactive system utilization metrics, such as CPU and memory consumption, can be used to scale after systems become overloaded. By dynamically scaling your infrastructure, you can reduce the costs of operating your game.
