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GAMECOST02-BP01 Optimize the cost of data transfer across the internet - Games Industry Lens
Implementation guidance

GAMECOST02-BP01 Optimize the cost of data transfer across the internet

While AWS primarily charges for outbound (egress) data transfer from your AWS resources to the internet, game companies can face high costs related to data transfer through AWS Direct Connect or AWS Gateway load balancers, which may charge for both inbound (ingress) and outbound data. Implement solutions that reduce the overall cost of transferring data from your game's AWS backend to your players, focusing on minimizing egress charges from your AWS resources as well as evaluating options to manage ingress and egress fees through AWS connectivity services.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

Use Amazon CloudFront to reduce the cost of content delivery and public-facing web applications.

Game content and assets that are stored in the cloud are typically stored in Amazon S3 and delivered to the game client either directly from S3 or from web servers hosted in Amazon EC2 that retrieve the content from Amazon S3 and deliver it to clients. To reduce the data transfer costs of content downloads, consider using Amazon CloudFront in front of your cloud storage to deliver content to users.

Using CloudFront can reduce the cost of data transfer because it costs less to deliver your content from CloudFront points-of-presence than directly from Regions, and CloudFront does not charge origin retrieval fees for AWS-based origins, such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. If your content is static and does not change often, you can use CloudFront to cache that data closer to end-users, which can further reduce costs.

CloudFront also improves the cost efficiency of front-facing public-facing web applications and services, even if caching is not used, since the cost of data transfer between your servers and clients can be reduced by routing traffic through the AWS network.

Amazon CloudWatch can be used to monitor your Amazon CloudFront usage. For use cases where you use multiple content delivery networks (CDNs), Amazon CloudFront Origin Shield can provide an additional layer of caching to consolidate and reduce the number of origin requests from different providers.

To understand your game network traffic, you can enable VPC Flow Logs and Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor to have end-to-end visibility on player or game backend connections. That approach can identify the causes for high data transfer cost and perform architectural changes to optimize data transfer spend.

Implementation steps

  • Use Amazon CloudFront in front of Amazon S3 or EC2-based content origins to reduce data transfer costs by leveraging lower-cost delivery from CloudFront points-of-presence and removing origin retrieval fees.

  • Enable VPC Flow Logs and Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor to analyze network traffic and identify architectural changes to optimize data transfer costs.

  • Implement CloudFront Origin Shield to consolidate and reduce origin requests when using multiple CDNs for additional cost efficiency.

For more best practices for content delivery, see the Content Delivery for Games whitepaper.