To give your players the best
experience possible—even
during peak hours—you need
compute resources that can
ramp up and down quickly
to accommodate fluctuating
player usage.
Flexibility is key, and AWS gives you game server compute options to build it yourself,
integrate existing tools, or even move to a fully managed service.
You can run your own orchestration for game servers that use Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2) or Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. You can deploy multiplayer game services
using container-based orchestration with managed services, such as Amazon Elastic
Container Service (ECS) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Or, you can use
a managed service with Amazon GameLift, which helps you deploy, operate, and scale
dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. GameLift includes Amazon
GameLift FleetIQ, which provides an extra logic layer for using low-cost Spot Instances for
game hosting while managing hosting tasks and can be used independently of GameLift.
Give players a great experience and save costs no matter which compute option you choose.
This guide focuses on RESTful server and stateful game server use cases and best practices
for load balancing RESTful EC2 servers. It begins with reference architecture for a
horizontally scalable game backend.
2
Quick jump
1.0 Reference architecture
2.0 Games as REST APIs
HTTP load balancing..........................................................5
Application Load Balancer.................................................6
Custom load balancer.........................................................7
HTTP Auto Scaling..............................................................8
Installing application code................................................9
3.0 Game servers
Matchmaking.....................................................................12
Routing messages.............................................................13
Mobile push notifications................................................13
Last thoughts on game servers......................................14
