Games Industry Lens update for the well-architected framework

As the gaming industry and live service games continue to grow, cloud services play a critical role in delivering immersive experiences to millions of players. Game development teams across the globe leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to build, test and grow games. They strive to build analytics and gain player insights to drive development and deliver seamless, low latency experiences worldwide.

Today, the AWS for Games team is excited to announce the release of an updated version of the AWS Well-Architected Games Industry Lens and whitepaper (Games Lens). The Games Lens consists of best practices that are intended to address the unique characteristics of building and operating games in the cloud. These recommendations, based on our experience working with games industry developers, publishers, and our own AWS for Games team, are reflected in the updated Games Lens. The Games Lens complements the Well-Architected Framework with best practices designed to address the unique challenges of building and operating games in the cloud.

Following are detailed use cases and patterns covered in the Games Lens. These include developing scalable game backends, and streamlining multiplayer server orchestration with Amazon GameLift. It also highlights conducting load tests, and performing real-time analysis of data to make development and operational decisions.

Why use the Games Industry Lens?

The new Games Industry Lens provides guidance to help you make informed design decisions aligned with your game’s unique requirements. By applying the techniques detailed in this lens, you can validate the resiliency, security, and efficiency of your game’s infrastructure.

The Games Lens highlights common areas for assessment and improvement across game workloads and is designed to align with the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, offering insights across:

• Operational Excellence – Focuses on best practices for deploying and operating cloud- based games at any scale. This includes the ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into your operations, and to continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.
• Security – Includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation.
• Reliability – Covers the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
• Performance Efficiency – Provides guidance on the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements and maintaining that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
• Cost Optimization – Includes the continual process of system refinement and improvement over the entire lifecycle to optimize cost, from the initial design of your first proof of concept to the ongoing operation of your production workload.
• Sustainability – Provides design principles, operational guidance, best-practices, and improvement plans to meet sustainability targets for your AWS workloads.

What’s new in the games industry lens?

Each pillar of the Games Lens has been updated to incorporate the most current guidance and introduce new AWS services available to game developers. Specifically, the new version of the lens enhances the existing in the following areas:

• Designing your gaming workloads on AWS. Updated scenarios captured in the Games Lens include:
  • Session-based game server hosting with serverless backends
  • Multi-Region and hybrid architectures for low-latency games
  • Container-based game backends
  • Serverless based game backends
  • Game analytics pipeline
• Implementation guidance and best practices for operationalizing gaming workloads:
  • Security guidance for player authentication and backends
  • Load testing guidance
  • Optimizing performance using Amazon EC2 Graviton instances
  • Managing game server deployments with Amazon GameLift
  • Disaster Recovery guidance for operating your game in multiple AWS regions
  • Best practices for optimizing your game development and hosting costs on AWS

Who should use the Games Industry Lens?

The Games Industry Lens is intended for all AWS customers who build games or offer services to gaming companies. These include startup game studios, AAA game developers, publishers, and companies offering game development or hosting solutions. The Games Lens will be valuable at any stage of game production, whether you’re in development, preparing for launch, or scaling and optimizing live operations on AWS.

Using Lenses in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

The AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool) is a service in the cloud that provides a consistent process for measuring your architecture using AWS best practices. You can use the AWS WA Tool to document and measure your workload against best practices defined in the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The AWS WA Tool also has domain specific lenses that you can apply to your workloads. Lenses provide domain-specific guidance that helps you consistently evaluate your architectures against industry best practices and identify areas for improvement.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework lens is automatically applied when a workload is defined. A workload can have one or more lenses applied. Each lens has its own set of questions, best practices, notes, and improvement plan.

There are two kinds of lenses that can be applied to your workloads:

1. Lens catalog: To begin reviewing your games workload, download and import the Games Industry Lens into AWS Well-Architected Tool from the public AWS Well-Architected custom lens GitHub repository.
2. Custom lenses: User-defined lenses that are not AWS official content.

You can tailor the questions in a custom lens to be specific to a particular technology, help you meet the governance needs within your organization, or extend the guidance provided by the Well-Architected Framework and the AWS lenses. Like the existing lenses, you can track progress over time by creating milestones and provide periodic status by generating reports. You apply custom lenses to a workload in the same way that you apply AWS provided lenses. You can also share custom lenses that you create with other AWS accounts, and custom lenses owned by others can be shared with you.

The Games Lens will be available in Q1 2026 as a custom lens in the AWS Samples GitHub.

Conclusion

Applying the Games Industry Lens to your existing architectures can validate the stability and efficiency of your design and provide recommendations to address identified gaps.

For more information about building your own Well-Architected systems using the Games Industry Lens, see the Games Industry Lens whitepaper on the AWS Well-Architected Website.

For information on how to use the new Lens to assess your workloads, please see the Well-Architected Tool and Lens Catalog briefs. If you require additional expert guidance, contact your AWS account team to engage an AWS for Games Solutions Architect.