Amazon GameLift Documentation

Amazon GameLift is designed for you to provision instances, deploy your game servers onto running instances, load-balance traffic across fleets of game servers, monitor instance and game server health, and replace unhealthy instances.

GameLift is designed for you to deploy your game servers across AWS Regions to reach your players across multiple continents. GameLift scans for available game servers in eligible AWS Regions. If low-latency game servers are not available, you can configure the service to add more capacity. GameLift helps you maintain a queue of waiting players until new games start or new instances launch, then places those players into a game using set criteria such as latency.

GameLift’s autoscaling feature is designed to start up to thousands of instances simultaneously and stop unused instances in minutes. You configure the service to automatically scale capacity based on a steady-state percentage target. The service is designed to automatically add or remove capacity as needed, adjusting to fluctuating load patterns to minimize rapid fluctuations in capacity. 

GameLift is designed to safeguard your game servers from frequently occurring network and transport layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. You can also configure the service to autoscale server capacity to decrease the likelihood of DDoS attacks taking your players offline. 

GameLift offers both on-demand and Spot instance types. For either instance type, you have the flexibility to select a configuration of CPU, memory, and networking capacity that is optimal for your game. 

The GameLift management console includes dashboards for monitoring the performance of your game. You can see real-time data on player demand, server capacity and health, CPU and memory utilization, and you can create operational alarms using Amazon CloudWatch. You can also configure GameLift to collect and store game server logs for retrieval and inspection.

GameLift provides certain standalone features that you can integrate with your own tools. These features have been designed to allow you to use them independently of other GameLift features. 

You may be able to use your existing tools and software without GameLift’s game server management layer to gradually move live games or launch new games to the cloud with GameLift FleetIQ. Since instances run in your account, you also have the flexibility to use containers or integrate instances with other AWS services such as AWS Shield and Amazon Elastic Container Service.

FleetIQ is designed to monitor and predict which Spot instances are best suited to host new sessions using criteria you set, so you use Spot instances while balancing the probability of game session interruptions.

GameLift is available for a multitude of instance types and in multiple AWS regions so that you can pick the instance types and geographies for your game. For more information on supported instance types and region availability for GameLift, see the product page on the AWS website.

You can configure FleetIQ to prioritize Spot, or to use only On-Demand or only Spot. 

You can describe the status of instances managed under GameLift FleetIQ using an API, to see whether instances are active, draining, or terminating. This allows you to implement a status-based checkpoint mechanism before you place a game session on an instance. It also allows you to drain your other resources if they’re tied to the instances.

FlexMatch is designed to let developers configure their matchmaking rulesets. FlexMatch is also accessible in standalone mode so developers can place formed matches on alternative game server solutions.

GameLift’s FlexMatch capabilities is designed to let you match players together based on rules you define. You can choose to build your matchmaking based on player skill, latency, or custom criteria. GameLift can place the formed matches onto GameLift servers or you can use FlexMatch in standalone mode and place the formed matches onto your own servers.  

FlexMatch is designed to enable you to match and connect up to 200 players to a single game session based upon a custom rule you define. Large Match Support also includes the ability to create multiple teams from one definition and allows you to perform automated backfilling. 

GameLift Realtime Servers are designed for games that don’t need a lot of backend horsepower, such as mobile, turn-based, and messaging games.

GameLift Realtime Servers include a network stack, with TCP and UDP networking. 

GameLift Realtime Servers are designed to let you update server logic by customizing scripts. You can add state and choose to execute server logic at regular intervals.

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the AWS Customer Agreement available at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement, or other agreement between you and AWS governing your use of AWS’s services.