Reduce Cost by up to 90% with Amazon GameLift FleetIQ and Spot Instances

Amazon GameLift is an AWS service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. Today we released two new additions to the service: FleetIQ and Spot instances. Spot instances offer access to spare AWS computing capacity at savings of up to 90% compared to On-Demand prices. You can achieve these savings while maintaining high game server availability with the use of FleetIQ, a new feature of Amazon GameLift Queues that places new sessions on game servers based on player latencies, instance prices, and Spot interruption rates.

With Spot instances you get the same high-performance hardware as On-Demand instances at savings up to 90%. Unlike On-Demand instances, Spot prices fluctuate based on the current supply and demand for each instance type in each region. Spot instance prices are set by Amazon and adjust gradually based on long-term trends in supply and demand for Spot instance capacity. Amazon GameLift Spot prices never exceed Amazon GameLift On-Demand prices.

To help predict the price of using Spot instances, customers can use the Amazon GameLift console to view historical pricing for each instance type and region.

While Spot instances save you money, Spot instances can be interrupted by AWS with two minutes of notification when AWS needs the capacity back. You can use this notification period to migrate or shut down games running on those instances. To limit the impact of Spot interruptions, we built FleetIQ. FleetIQ is a new feature exclusive to Amazon GameLift that tracks Spot interruption rates and uses this data to automatically place games on instances with low interruption frequencies.

To take advantage of Spot instances and FleetIQ, you can use the Amazon GameLift console or API to set up Queues with multiple fleets of Spot and On-Demand instances. By adding more fleets into each Queue, you give FleetIQ more options to improve latency, interruption rate, and cost. To start a new game session on an instance, FleetIQ first selects the region with the lowest latency for each player, then chooses the fleet with the lowest interruption rate and cost.

To take advantage of Spot instances and FleetIQ, you can use the Amazon GameLift console (or API) to set up Queues with multiple fleets of Spot and On-Demand instances.

The combination of FleetIQ and Spot instances gives you a new set of tools to save money while still providing a great experience to your players.  To learn more about Amazon GameLift Spot instances and FleetIQ, visit aws.amazon.com/gamelift.