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Overview

This Guidance demonstrates how to deploy a custom, lightweight cross-platform game identity system, in addition to game backend features such as game server hosting with Amazon GameLift, chat with WebSockets, and friends lists and recommendations with Amazon Neptune. The identity system supports a number of authentication options including guest, Amazon Cognito, Steam, Sign-in with Apple, Google Play, and Facebook. You can also easily customize the Guidance to support any additional platforms, such as consoles. The Guidance is designed to be easily extendable with custom backend features and includes templates for both serverless and containerized backend components.

Additionally, this Guidance provides software development kits (SDKs) and sample code for Unreal Engine 5 , Unity 2021 (and newer versions), and Godot 4 game engines. The SDKs integrate with the identity component and the sample backend features.

How it works

This architecture diagram illustrates how to deploy a custom, lightweight, and scalable cross-platform game identity component and how to use the identities to authenticate against custom game backend components on AWS

Download the architecture diagram

Deploy with confidence

Ready to deploy? Review the sample code on GitHub for detailed deployment instructions to deploy as-is or customize to fit your needs. 

Go to sample code

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

The custom identity component in this Guidance utilizes AWS X-Ray that traces user requests, and leverages Lambda Powertools to provide detailed information from within the backend logic. In addition, all components of this Guidance use Amazon CloudWatch to track logs of virtual private cloud (VPC) flows, API Gateway access, Amazon S3 access, Lambda completions, and AWS Fargate tasks. Finally, AWS CDK allows for controlled changes and consistent configuration across environments, helping you to meet your security and compliance needs.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper

To support robust identity management, the custom identity component of this Guidance manages player identities and authentication. All other features of this Guidance secure access by validating JSON Web Tokens against public keys provided by the identity component. The custom identity component is protected by AWS WAF , a web application firewall that protects applications against common web exploits. Also, all data is encrypted at rest, as well as in transit.

Read the Security whitepaper

This Guidance mainly leverages fully managed services that are highly available by default across multiple Availability Zones (AZ) within an AWS Region. For Fargate , a multi-AZ configuration is utilized for high availability and all database tables in DynamoDB are protected with point-in-time recovery.

Read the Reliability whitepaper

This Guidance combines a number of different approaches to allow for various features to improve performance. First, the services selected for this Guidance are designed to perform at scale for game launches and other spikes in traffic by leveraging the automatically scaling components of serverless services. Next, the X-Ray data provided from the custom identity component allows developers to find congestion and calibrate the Guidance to their needs to optimize performance. Finally, the public keys that validate the JSON Web Tokens are provided through CloudFront to optimize latency for backend components.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper

This Guidance leverages serverless components when possible, allowing you to pay only for the exact resources you use. To further help with cost, consider AWS Savings Plans that can be utilized to optimize the cost for both Lambda and Fargate . Also, moving from on-demand DynamoDB tables to auto-scaling provisioned capacity allows you to use  DynamoDB reserved capacity to reduce costs when the baseline traffic is known.

All services utilized in this Guidance are configured to scale based on demand, including API Gateway , Lambda , DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , Fargate , Secrets Manager , and AWS WAF , ensuring that only the minimum resources are required. 

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper

The components of serverless services in this Guidance scale automatically, allowing the components to scale while continually matching the load with only the minimum resources needed. This reduces the environmental impact of the infrastructure by avoiding provisioning unused capacity.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.