GAMEREL02-BP01 Implement a scaling strategy that incorporates the state of active player game sessions
Implement a solution for automatically scaling your game infrastructure in a manner that incorporates the stateful nature of your actively connected player sessions and gracefully handles scaling activities without disrupting gameplay.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High
Implementation guidance
One of advantages of developing a game in the cloud is the elasticity that can be achieved by automatically scaling server infrastructure as needed to meet demand. While stateless or asynchronous games and backend services can be dynamically scaled using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling policies, EKS autoscaling, or similar techniques typically adopted for scalable web applications, game developers typically require a more customized approach for scaling stateful or synchronous games to help block disruptions to active player sessions.
Implementation steps
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For stateful games, generate custom metrics that can be used to monitor the state of your player sessions and available game server capacity, which can be reported to Amazon CloudWatch as custom metrics. Exercise features with application monitoring, such as CloudWatch Synthetics, checking the game for impairment of functions that simple up and down health monitoring may not detect.
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Using custom metrics, implement game server scaling software, for example, as a serverless application using AWS Lambda function or AWS Fargate, to manage the fleet of dedicated game server instances by using the AWS SDK to make API calls to update the minimum, maximum, and desired capacity settings for the EC2 Auto Scaling groups hosting your game server build.
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Use Amazon GameLift to host your game servers and use the out-of-the-box game server auto scaling capabilities to manage this scaling process for you.
The automatic scaling capabilities of Amazon GameLift are aware of active player sessions and can be configured to block the termination or scale-in of game server instances that are actively hosting players. For more information, see Monitor Amazon GameLift Servers with Amazon CloudWatch.
