Amazon GameLift Adds New Regions and Autoscaling Features

Today, Amazon GameLift expands to two new AWS regions in addition to the currently available Northern Virginia and Oregon regions. Developers can now deploy game servers for their session-based, multiplayer games throughout North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

• New region names are: eu-west-1 (Ireland) and ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo)
• Endpoints are: gamelift.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com and gamelift.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com.

Additionally, Amazon GameLift’s new autoscaling feature lets developers set up Amazon GameLift to dynamically manage server fleet capacity. With this feature, capacity can closely follow the game’s demand curve, so developers can keep costs down while still ensuring that players can get connected fast.

• Autoscaling uses a set of policies, created by the game developer, that tell Amazon GameLift when to change capacity and by how much. Scaling policies are based on a set of metrics, such as server utilization, game session counts, and player counts. For example, a policy might say: “if the number of idle instances exceeds 20 for longer than 15 minutes, scale down by 10 instances”.  Fleet size can also be constrained with minimum and maximum capacity limits.
•  Metrics available for autoscaling include:
  • Idle instances
  • Available player sessions
  • Current player sessions
  • Active game sessions
  • Activating game sessions
  • Active instances

• Game session protection ensures that an instance with active game sessions will not be terminated until all players disconnect. Developers can apply this protection to an entire fleet or to individual game sessions.
• The Amazon GameLift console offers tools to help create and apply autoscaling policies and set the game session protection option. Developers can also complete these actions using the AWS CLI or AWS SDKs.

Thanks to all of you who have sent feedback to us in both the GameDev forums and by sending email to lumberyard-feedback@amazon.com. The Amazon GameLift and Lumberyard teams love hearing what you have to say, so keep it coming! We’ll continue to lean on customer feedback as we update Amazon GameLift to make it easier to deploy, operate, and scale your session-based multiplayer games.

If you’ll be at GDC next week and want to meet the Amazon GameLift team, please swing by the Lumberyard booth in the Main Hall #1224, or visit our Amazon GameLift Dev Day talk on Tuesday, March 15, at 10-11am.