AWS for Games Blog
Accelerate your game at global scale with Amazon CloudFront
So, you’ve taken months, if not years, to create the perfect game and you just know your players are going to love it. Now it’s time to launch. All that’s left to do is put your game on the marketplace and let them have at it, right? Not quite, but we can help.
To really increase your chances of success, you’ll need a network and security strategy. This post provides insights that will help make your game’s delivery more successful.
So where to begin? The first step is to use a content delivery network (CDN) like Amazon CloudFront to cache your static, binary content like game downloads, mods, promotional content, and patches closer to your users. CloudFront has more than 180 Points of Presence (POPs) located all around the world so your content can be cached and delivered closer to your players, which provides a faster and more reliable user experience. Using CloudFront to globally distribute your content will also play an important role in reducing the load on your game’s download origin, which can be especially important if your game unexpectedly becomes a smashing success.
CloudFront can also accelerate dynamic turn-based, asynchronous games by reducing latency through terminating SSL connections at the edge, TCP optimizations, reusing session connections, and using the AWS private network for optimized, low latency routing between the POP and your origin game server. Read our blog, ‘Dynamic Whole Site Delivery’ for more information on delivering dynamic content with CloudFront.
CloudFront now supports the WebSocket protocol, a real-time communication protocol providing bi-directional connection between a client and an origin to reduce the amount of times they have to re-initiate connections. Our gaming customers use this for their features like chat apps, leaderboards, and gameplay.
It’s also important to protect your website and authentication portals with CloudFront. Many developers are using Lambda@Edge to program and customize CloudFront’s response to specific user requests. For example, you can now use CloudFront and Lambda@Edge to enhance the security of your web application by authorizing user requests before a response is given, even without having to change the application itself. Check out our blog, ‘Authorization@Edge’ to see a step-by-step guide on our blog on how to implement this solution.
Now, you might be concerned that all these features and global performance is going to cost you a lot of loot. One of the benefits of CloudFront is that it can be more cost effective to deliver data out of CloudFront than out of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Furthermore, AWS does not charge fees for any data transfer between CloudFront and other AWS origins like S3 and EC2. You only pay for the request fees and data transfer out of CloudFront. Depending on your need, you can pay for per GB bandwidth with our on-demand pricing or through reserved capacity pricing for customers who are willing to commit to a minimum monthly usage level (>10TB/mo.) for 12 months.