GAMEREL02-BP02 Support the use of multiple EC2 instance types for your game

When hosting your game using EC2 instances, or if you use containers hosted on EC2 instances in your AWS account, use multiple instance types in your hosting strategy. By using multiple instance types, you can increase the number of compute options that can be used when your game is scaling to add more servers to support player growth, which improves reliability in case your preferred instance type is unavailable.

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

Implementation guidance

When hosting your game using Spot Instances, use multiple instance types since the availability of Spot Instances fluctuates based on customer demand.

Test your game on multiple instance types to meet your cost and performance requirements and determine a prioritized ranking of instance types. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling supports using multiple instance types and sizes as well as assigning weights to each instance type in your configuration so that you can implement prioritized ranking of compute options.

When hosting your game using Amazon GameLift managed hosting, decide what type of instances your game needs and how to run game server processes on them (using a runtime configuration). When choosing resources for a fleet, consider several factors, including game operating system, instance type (the computing hardware), and whether to use On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, or both. Hosting costs with Amazon GameLift primarily depend on the type of instances you use. For more information, see Choose compute resources for a managed fleet.

Implementation steps