Managing hosting with Amazon GameLift containers - Amazon GameLift
Key featuresUsing container fleets during public preview

Managing hosting with Amazon GameLift containers

This documentation is for a feature that is in public preview release. It is subject to change.

Amazon GameLift provides a complete cloud hosting service to support containerized solutions for game server hosting. With Amazon GameLift container fleets, you can take advantage of container benefits such as portability, agility, and fault tolerance.

Key features

The following features are available with Amazon GameLift container fleets.

  • Develop a custom container architecture with lightweight containers to run your game server software on Amazon GameLift hosting resources.

  • Include the Amazon GameLift Agent to manage the lifecycle of game server processes inside your containers. The on-compute Agent carries out your instructions on when and how to start server processes and how many to maintain for game session hosting.

  • Customize resources provided by Amazon GameLift to build container images with your game server application. Use the provided dockerfile to create a Linux-based container image. Store images for your container fleets in an Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) private repository.

  • Deliver low-latency player experiences by deploying container fleet resources to any AWS Region or Local Zone that Amazon GameLift supports. Create multi-location container fleets for streamlined fleet management. See Amazon GameLift hosting locations.

  • Test your containerized game hosting solutions with an Amazon GameLift Anywhere fleet. Use Anywhere to locally test your solution development, including your Amazon GameLift SDK integration and your container image configurations.

  • Track game hosting performance with container-specific performance metrics. Monitor the health of your fleet resources using hardware metrics.

  • Use Amazon GameLift game session placement tools, including queues and FlexMatch matchmaking, to match players to the best possible game sessions being hosted on your container fleets.

  • Manage container fleet resources using AWS CloudFormation templates for Amazon GameLift.

Using container fleets during public preview

The new container fleets feature is currently in public preview. During this phase, the following Amazon GameLift features are supported:

  • Use container fleets to host game servers built for Linux. Container fleets use Amazon_Linux_2023 and support Linux container images. Windows containers are not supported.

  • Integrate game server projects with Amazon GameLift server SDK version 5+ only. Previous versions are not supported.

  • Use any of the Amazon EC2 On-Demand instance types that Amazon GameLift supports. Spot fleets are not supported at this time.