Managing game session placement with Amazon GameLift queues
A game session queue is the primary mechanism that Amazon GameLift uses to search for available game servers and choose them to host new game sessions. Queues offers a far more efficient way to process large numbers of game session requests and find placements for them across multiple fleets of hosting resources. If your hosting solution uses more than one fleet, and you're processing high volumes of requests, you probably need a queue.
When your game wants to start a new game session for players, it sends a placement request to the Amazon GameLift service, which funnels it to the queue. The queue's configuration determines when and how the requests are processed. When processing a placement request, Amazon GameLift searches a set of fleets for a game server to host the game session. Placement succeeds when Amazon GameLift finds an available game server and prompts it to start a game session.
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Queue characteristics
An Amazon GameLift game session queue is an AWS cloud resource. You can create a queue in any AWS Region that Amazon GameLift supports (see Amazon GameLift service locations). Game session placement requests are sent to that location and processed there.
Automating game session placement with queues offers significant benefits for both game developers and players. These include:
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Queues deliver the "best possible" placement. When processing game session placement requests, a queue uses the Amazon GameLift FleetIQ algorithm to prioritize placements based on a set of defined preferences, including cost, location, and player latency.
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Queues support Spot fleets to help reduce game hosting costs. You can configure your queues with AWS Spot fleets, which often offer significantly lower hosting costs, as well as On-Demand fleets. Because low cost is one of the key criteria for placements, queues can always take advantage of differences in cost.
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Queues can place new games faster during high demand. By configuring a queue with multiple fleets, you're providing more flexible options for game session placement. But additional fleets also provide backup capacity as needed when demand increases. For any placement request, if Amazon GameLift can't place a game session in the most preferred location, it automatically moves on to evaluate other locations.
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Queues can make game server availability more resilient. Outages can happen. With a multi-fleet queue, a slowdown or outage doesn't have to affect player access to your game. By configuring your queue with fleets that have capacity in different AWS Regions and availability zones, you can help make sure that players can always find a game session to join.
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Get metrics on game session placements and queue performance. Amazon GameLift emits queue metrics, including statistics on placement successes and failures, the number of requests in the queue, and average time that requests spend in the queue. You can view these metrics in the Amazon GameLift console or in CloudWatch.
To get started by creating a basic starter queue, see Create a game session queue.
