Plan and deploy your Amazon GameLift resources - Amazon GameLift
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Plan and deploy your Amazon GameLift resources

Use the following tips to help plan your global Amazon GameLift resources deployment. For information about where you can host your games with Amazon GameLift, see Amazon GameLift service locations.

To deploy your Amazon GameLift resources, complete the following tasks:

  • Package and upload your game server to Amazon GameLift or to your hardware. When uploading your server to Amazon GameLift, you upload it only to the home AWS Region of your fleet. Amazon GameLift automatically distributes the server to other locations in the fleet. For more information, see Uploading builds and scripts to Amazon GameLift.

  • Design and deploy a Amazon GameLift fleet for your game. Determine the type of computing resources to use, which locations to deploy to, whether to use queues, and other options. For more information, see Amazon GameLift fleet design guide.

  • Create queues to manage new game session placements and Spot Instance strategies. For more information, see Design a game session queue.

  • Use automatic scaling to manage your fleet's hosting capacity for expected player demand. For more information, see Scaling Amazon GameLift hosting capacity.

  • Use FlexMatch matchmaking rules for your game. For more information, see FlexMatch integration with Amazon GameLift hosting.

Automatically deploy your Amazon GameLift resources

To streamline the global deployment of your Amazon GameLift resources, we recommend that you use infrastructure as code (IaC) to define the resources. Because Amazon GameLift supports AWS CloudFormation templates, you can set parameters in the templates for any deployment-specific configurations.

To manage the deployment of your AWS CloudFormation stacks, we also recommend using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools and services such as AWS CodePipeline. These help you deploy automatically or with approval whenever you build game server binary.

The following are some common steps of Amazon GameLift resources deployment for a new game server version that you can automate using a CI/CD tool or service:

  • Building and testing your game server binary.

  • Uploading the binary to Amazon GameLift or your hardware.

  • Deploying new fleets in the new build.

  • After you deploy the new fleets, removing the previous version fleets from your Amazon GameLift queue and replacing them with the new fleets.

  • After the previous version fleets successfully end all game sessions, deleting the AWS CloudFormation stacks of those fleets.

You can also use the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to define your Amazon GameLift resources. For more information about the AWS CDK, see the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) Developer Guide.