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GAMEPERF07-BP05 Use network acceleration technology to improve performance across the internet - Games Industry Lens
Implementation guidance

GAMEPERF07-BP05 Use network acceleration technology to improve performance across the internet

In addition to physically placing latency-sensitive game infrastructure closer to players, you can also improve the player experience by optimizing the network performance for your game. AWS uses the BGP protocol to influence internet routing to use the fastest path to our border network from Internet Service Providers. If you operate your own network and need more control and observability over routing behavior and BGP advertisement, you can use private Peering or Direct Connect to route traffic from the internet to your game running on AWS.

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

Implementation guidance

Consider the following reference architecture to support improved internet performance and responsiveness.

Enhanced network performance for gaming using Global Accelerator

For a fully managed solution to network routing, AWS Global Accelerator improves your application's network performance using the AWS global network, which can be used to accelerate your gameplay traffic, voice chat, and real-time messaging traffic, as well as other latency-sensitive applications while providing fast failover to your game servers. Global Accelerator custom routing accelerators can be integrated with your matchmaking service to provide deterministic routing of multiple players to the same game session using static anycast IP addresses and ports.

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Your game development teams may be distributed around the world and require performant access to shared content or assets. To improve the performance for shared content stored in Amazon S3 buckets, you can setup bi-directional replication of your data across Regions using S3 Cross-Region Replication so that users can access data from buckets closer to them. To simplify this access pattern, use S3 Multi- Region Access Points which accelerates requests to S3 over the global network using Global Accelerator. 

For more information, refer to Improving the Player Experience by Leveraging AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon GameLift FleetIQ.

Implementation steps

  • Use AWS Global Accelerator to help improve network performance for gameplay traffic, voice chat, and real-time messaging, while facilitating fast failover to game servers.

  • Configure Global Accelerator custom routing accelerators to integrate with your matchmaking service, enabling deterministic routing of players to game sessions using static anycast IPs.

  • Enable S3 Cross-Region Replication to replicate shared content across Regions for distributed game development teams.

  • Use S3 Multi-Region Access Points to accelerate S3 data access over the AWS global network for globally distributed users.