GAMEREL01-BP01 Distribute game infrastructure across multiple Availability Zones and Regions to improve resiliency

To minimize the impact of localized infrastructure impairments on your players, you should distribute your infrastructure deployment uniformly across enough independent locations to be able to withstand unexpected impairments while still having enough capacity to meet the needs of your player demand.

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

Implementation guidance

When deploying your game infrastructure, it is recommended to uniformly distribute your capacity across multiple Availability Zones in a Region so that you can withstand disruptions to one or more Availability Zones without disrupting the player experience. Game backend services such as web applications should be load balanced across multiple Availability Zones or should be built using managed service such as AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway which provide Regional high availability by design. Similarly, components that maintain state such as caches, databases, message queues, and storage solutions should be designed to provide durable persistence of data across multiple Availability Zones, which is provided by design in services such as Amazon S3, DynamoDB, and Amazon SQS, and can be configured in other services.

When designing your game server hosting architecture for resiliency, deploy your fleets of game servers uniformly across the Availability Zones within an AWS Region to maximize your access to available compute capacity in the Region as well as reduce the impact scope of Availability Zone impairments. For example, you can configure Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to use the Availability Zones. If an EC2 instance becomes unhealthy, EC2 Auto Scaling can replace the instance, as well as launch instances into other Availability Zones if one or more of the Availability Zones becomes unavailable.

For critical infrastructure, such as authentication, provision a minimum number of viable instances running across multiple Availability Zones, and use auto scaling to handle load increases or fault tolerance if there is an impairment with one of the Availability Zones.

Deploy your game infrastructure into multiple Regions to maximize availability. Cross-Regional disaster recovery features like Aurora global databases and redundant infrastructure that can become active with a simple DNS change deployed into a secondary Region can provide service continuity should the primary Region become impaired. While we encourage this for your game backend services to achieve high availability, this recommendation is especially important for your game servers.

For example, in a multiplayer game, your infrastructure capacity for game servers is likely to outpace the capacity needs for your other services, since game servers are used to host game sessions for players. Many games choose to shard players into logical game Regions (like US west and east). To simplify the player experience and make it straightforward to use global infrastructure to host games, consider de-coupling the name of your player-facing game Regions from the underlying cloud provider Region or data center location that is physically hosting the game servers, along with other infrastructure such as Local Zones or your own data centers that are hosting game server instances supporting that player game Region.

When designing your matchmaking service, deploy a multi-Region architecture with separate software deployments across Regions. Decouple your matchmaking service deployment from the fleets that host your game server instances so that you can route players to a game server in Regions regardless of which regional deployment of your matchmaking service handled the matchmaking request.

Design logic in your matchmaking implementation to favor the game server Regions that meet your latency and other rules, with the ability to fallback to routing players to other Regions if your fleets are low on capacity or there are other regional infrastructure disruptions.

Implementation steps

Resources