Amazon GameLift Servers managed container fleets
Amazon GameLift Servers managed container fleets provide cloud-based resources for hosting your containerized game server software. With a managed container fleet, you get the flexibility, security, and reliability of AWS Cloud resources, optimized for multiplayer game hosting. Amazon GameLift Servers provides robust host management tools.
Speed up onboarding with these tools for managed containers:
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The containers starter kit
streamlines integration and fleet setup. It adds essential game session management features to your game server, and uses pre-configured templates to build a container fleet and an automated deployment pipeline for your game server. After deployment, use the Amazon GameLift Servers console and API tools to monitor fleet performance, manage game sessions, and analyze metrics. -
For Unreal Engine or Unity developers, use the game engine Amazon GameLift Servers plugins and server SDKs
to integrate your game server and build a container fleet from inside your game engine's development environment. The plugin's guided workflows help you create a fast, simple solution with cloud-based hosting using managed containers. You can build on this foundation to create a custom hosting solution for your game.
A managed container fleet is a set of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running Linux, which Amazon GameLift Servers owns and operates based on your configuration. These instances are physically located in supported AWS Regions or Local Zones. When you create a container fleet, you choose an EC2 instance type that meets your game server's requirements for computing power, memory, storage, networking capabilities.
For a managed container fleet, you store Linux-based container images in an Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) repository and create a container group definition to describe your container architecture. When you create a fleet, Amazon GameLift Servers provisions a fleet instance with the latest version of the Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and uses the container group definition to deploy your container images. All instances in a container fleet will use the same AMI version, even if you update a container group definition or change a container image.
Note
As a best practice, we recommend replacing your fleets every 30 days to maintain a secure and up-to-date runtime environment for your hosted game servers. This requires creating a new fleet and migrating player traffic to it. For more guidance, see Security best practices for Amazon GameLift Servers.
After deploying the containerized instance, containers start launching game server processes. Each game server process establishes a connection to the Amazon GameLift Servers service, reports readiness to host a game session, and begins communicating health status. Amazon GameLift Servers can then prompt the server process to start a game session.
In addition to fleet deployment, Amazon GameLift Servers handles the following host management tasks so you don't have to:
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Tracks the status of all containers in the fleet and replaces stale or unhealthy ones.
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Handles authentication for communication between server processes and the Amazon GameLift Servers service.
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Offers auto-scaling tools that adjust fleet capacity dynamically to meet player demand.
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Reports performance metrics for the fleet's EC2 instances, containers, and server processes.
See these topics about how to set up and maintain managed container fleets:
