GAMESUS02-BP01 Select managed services for appropriate compute workloads

Architect your game backend services to use managed services for event driven or highly variable traffic workloads. Managed services shift the management of infrastructure to AWS and distributes the environmental impact across multiple users because of the multi-tenanted control planes.

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

Implementation guidance

AWS services like AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate (Containers), and Amazon Gamelift (Game server orchestration) can run code, containers, or orchestrate your game servers without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. These services automatically scale based on player demand and you're only charged for the resources you consume. Because the underlying infrastructure is managed on your behalf, you are able to focus solely on your games and backend services' requirements.

You can use AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, and logging. With Lambda, you need to supply your code in one of the language runtimes that Lambda supports. Lambda is useful for processing game events, player authentication, in-game purchase processing, and matchmaking requests. Lambda automatically scales based on the number of events and can handle unexpected spikes in traffic.

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). AWS Fargate makes it straightforward to focus on building your applications by alleviating the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Fargate is ideal for backend services that handle player profiles, state management and matchmaking.

Amazon GameLift is a managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. You can deploy your first game server in the cloud in just minutes, saving up to thousands of engineering hours in upfront software development and lowering the technical risks that often cause developers to cut multiplayer features from their designs.

Implementation steps