Stream groups manage how Amazon GameLift Streams allocates resources and handles concurrent streams, allowing you to effectively manage capacity and costs. Within a stream group, you specify an application to stream, streaming locations and their capacity, and the stream class you want to use when streaming applications to your end-users. A stream class defines the hardware configuration of the compute resources that Amazon GameLift Streams will use when streaming, such as the CPU, GPU, and memory.
Stream capacity represents the number of concurrent streams that can be active at a time. You set stream capacity per location, per stream group. The following capacity settings are available:
- Always-on capacity: This setting, if non-zero, indicates minimum streaming capacity which is allocated to you and is never released back to the service. You pay for this base level of capacity at all times, whether used or idle.
- Maximum capacity: This indicates the maximum capacity that the service can allocate for you. Newly created streams may take a few minutes to start. Capacity is released back to the service when idle. You pay for capacity that is allocated to you until it is released.
- Target-idle capacity: This indicates idle capacity which the service pre-allocates and holds for you in anticipation of future activity. This helps to insulate your users from capacity-allocation delays. You pay for capacity which is held in this intentional idle state.
Values for capacity must be whole number multiples of the tenancy value of the stream group's stream class.
To adjust the capacity of any
ACTIVE stream group, call
UpdateStreamGroup.
If the
CreateStreamGroup request is successful, Amazon GameLift Streams assigns a unique ID to the stream group resource and sets the status to
ACTIVATING. It can take a few minutes for Amazon GameLift Streams to finish creating the stream group while it searches for unallocated compute resources and provisions them. When complete, the stream group status will be
ACTIVE and you can start stream sessions by using
StartStreamSession. To check the stream group's status, call
GetStreamGroup.
Stream groups should be recreated every 3-4 weeks to pick up important service updates and fixes. Stream groups that are older than 180 days can no longer be updated with new application associations. Stream groups expire when they are 365 days old, at which point they can no longer stream sessions. The exact expiration date is indicated by the date value in the
ExpiresAt field.