What is Amazon GameLift?

• Deploy your own custom multiplayer game servers to the cloud for hosting.

• Run low cost hosting resources using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances.

• Automatically scale the amount of hosting resources that your game needs based on usage.

• Manage your Amazon EC2 compute resources all in one place using Amazon GameLift FleetIQ.

• Match players in multiplayer games with Amazon GameLift FlexMatch.

• Iteratively test your game server and client builds with Amazon GameLift Anywhere.

• Use your own hardware while managing it all in one place with Amazon GameLift Anywhere.

Key features

• Host multiplayer games that run on Amazon Linux or Windows Server operating systems.

• Provide low-latency gameplay experiences to your players, wherever they are. Deploy game servers globally across any of the AWS Regions and Local Zones that Amazon GameLift supports. For a complete list, see Amazon GameLift service locations.

• Use Amazon GameLift intelligent game session placement so that players always get the best possible hosted player experience. You can rely on Amazon GameLift decision-making, or you can customize around placement criteria such as cost, player latency, and geographic locations.

• Choose how to scale your hosting resources to meet player demand. Manage capacity manually or set up automatic scaling. With target-based auto scaling, you can maintain a dynamically sizeed buffer of idle capacity, which helps you control costs while ensuring that new players can get into games with minimal waiting.

• Let Amazon GameLift deploy and manage your cloud-based game servers. Amazon GameLift creates resources as you need them, installs your game server software, and automatically starts processes to host game sessions for players. Set up custom health tracking and let Amazon GameLift detect and resolve poor-performing resources.

• Take advantage of Amazon GameLift monitoring capabilities to assess performance and usage. You can track metrics on factors such as hardware performance, game session placement efficiency, and server process life cycles. You can track active game sessions and player sessions to observe usage over time. You can also download and store game session logs.

• For production hosting, automate your game hosting resource management and deployments using AWS CloudFormation templates for Amazon GameLift and the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). Take advantage of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools and services such as AWS CodePipeline.

• Expand your hosting solution to the AWS Cloud. Supplement the capabilities of your existing hosting solution (on-premises hardware or other cloud-based hosting) by adding Amazon GameLift managed hosting. With managed hosting, you can increase your hosting capacity or add "burst" capacity to rapidly scale up and pay only for resources when you need them. You can also take advantage of the Amazon GameLift service's global footprint to reach more players around the world and provide the low-latency multiplayer experience they expect.

• Prepare for migration to cloud-based hosting. If you're considering or planning to migrate to the AWS Cloud (instead of upgrading your own hardware), a hybrid hosting solution is an easy way for you to make the transition as gradually as you need to.

• Boost latency for players in locations beyond those serviced by Amazon GameLift. If you're already using Amazon GameLift managed hosting, you might need to support players in certain situations. For example, you might want to reach players in unusually remote locations or significantly reduce latency to those areas. Add custom hosting locations and use Amazon GameLift Anywhere to manage those locations along with your managed hosting resources.

• Use the same game client and server components with both managed and self-managed hosting resources. Provide a unified player experience across all hosting resources.

• Use the same FlexMatch matchmakers to place matches across all hosting resources.

• Centrally manage your hybrid hosting resources together while you deploy them across the globe.

• As player demand fluctuates, manage game session loads seamlessly across managed and self-managed resources.

• With the Amazon GameLift Agent, you can use the same tooling to manage game server life cycles on all types of hosting resources.

• Gather game and player metrics and logs across all hosting resources. Take advantage of Amazon GameLift features and other AWS services to combine data and develop cohesive observability solutions.

Key features

• Perform fast, iterative testing as you develop your multiplayer games.

• Use Amazon GameLift tools to manage game servers that are hosted on your own hardware.

• Take advantage of available hardware that is closest to your players, anywhere.

Key features

• Balance match creation speed and match quality.

• Match players or teams based on defined characteristics.

• Define rules to place players into matches based on latency.

Key features

• Get optimized Spot Instance balancing using the FleetIQ algorithm.

• Use player routing features to manage your game server resources efficiently, and provide a better player experience for joining games.

• Automatically scale hosting capacity based on player usage.

• Directly manage Amazon EC2 instances in your own AWS account.

• Use any of the supported game server executable formats, including Windows, Linux, containers, and Kubernetes.

Key features

• Use Amazon GameLift management features, including auto scaling, multi-location queues, and game session placement.

• Use Amazon GameLift hosting resources and choose the type of AWS computing hardware for your fleets.

• Take advantage of a full network stack for game client and server interaction.

• Get core game server functionality with customizable server logic.

• Make live updates to Realtime configurations and server logic.