Game architecture with Amazon GameLift FleetIQ

Supplementing on-premises hosting

Amazon GameLift FleetIQ is designed to reuse your existing game backend, including any player geo-IP routing, matchmaking, or lobby services that you might already have in place. The following example illustrates how Amazon GameLift FleetIQ might fit into an existing on-premises deployment.

In this example, game hosting is initially handled with four proprietary data centers to host players in North America and Europe. Depending on their approximate physical location, players are routed to one of two regional matchmakers. The matchmakers group players by skill and latency and then place them onto nearby game servers to minimize lag.

The game developer wants to replace their North America game servers with servers provided by Amazon GameLift FleetIQ. To start, they make minor updates to their game server to enable it for use with Amazon GameLift FleetIQ and then create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This image will be installed on every EC2 instance that is deployed for the game. The image contains the game server, dependencies, and anything else needed to run game sessions for players.

With the AMI ready, the developer creates two Amazon GameLift FleetIQ game server groups, one for each AWS North America Region (us-east-1 and us-west-2). The developer passes in launch template (which provides the AMI), a list of desired instance types, and other configuration settings for the group. The list of desired instance types tells Amazon GameLift FleetIQ which types to use when checking for Spot Instances that are viable for game hosting.

Finally, the developer integrates the AWS SDK with Amazon GameLift FleetIQ into their North American matchmaker, which calls Amazon GameLift FleetIQ when a new group of players needs server capacity for a game session. Amazon GameLift FleetIQ locates a Spot Instance with an available game server, reserves it for the players, and provides server connection information. Players connect to the server, play the game, and disconnect. To start a new game, players re-enter matchmaking, which prompts Amazon GameLift FleetIQ to find another available game server. Each new game request triggers Amazon GameLift FleetIQ to search for and select game servers with a low chance of interruptions. As a result, Amazon GameLift FleetIQ is constantly redirecting players away from game servers that are not viable for game hosting, even as Spot Instance availability fluctuates over time.