GAMEREL03-BP01 Monitor game server disruptions, and use the data to improve hosting architecture to achieve reliability goals

Monitor game server metrics and the impact of failures or degradations in performance, such as increased latency under load, on player behavior over time so that you can adjust your game server hosting strategy to meet your game's reliability requirements. Game server infrastructure to be degraded should be removed from service immediately if it is impacting players or proactively replaced when there are no active player sessions hosted on the server.

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

Implementation guidance

For scenarios where games are hosted as REST APIs, system reliability can be managed like traditional web application architectures, where traffic can be load balanced across multiple servers in a distributed manner to mitigate the risk of server failures.

For real-time synchronous gameplay, a game session is usually hosted on a game server process running on a virtual machine, or game server instance, since gameplay state needs to be maintained in a performant manner and replicated to connected game clients. This implementation means that a player's experience is tightly coupled to the performance and reliability of the game server process that hosts their game session. This type of architecture makes managing the reliability of game servers more complex than traditional approaches.

To mitigate the impact of a game server failure, configure your game to continuously perform asynchronous updates of a player's game state to a highly-available cache or database such as Amazon ElastiCache (Redis OSS) or Amazon MemoryDB. If a server failure occurs, the player's last saved game state can be fetched from the external data store, and their session can be restored on a new game server instance.

However, this approach adds additional cost and complexity to manage this external state, and may not be suitable for fast-paced or competitive games where the state changes are so frequent and happening at such a significant scale that introducing even a performant in-memory cache data store would result in replication lag that is too significant to be useful to restore a session from. For games of this nature, the optimal approach is to accept the loss of the server and send the player back to a game lobby to find another session or you can automatically redirect them into another game session.

Capture as much useful log data about what caused the server disruption so that you can investigate the issue later. Amazon GameLift provides guidance for debugging fleet issues and provides the ability to remotely access Amazon GameLift fleet instances .

Implementation steps