Setting up a hosting fleet with Amazon GameLift
In this section, you'll find information about designing, building, and maintaining Amazon GameLift fleets to host your game servers. See Amazon GameLift hosting to learn more about the hosting solutions that Amazon GameLift offers, including those that use managed EC2 fleets, self-managed Anywhere fleets for your on-premises hardware, and a hybrid solution that uses both.
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Fleet characteristics
An Amazon GameLift fleet is a collection of computing resources that run your game servers and host game sessions for players. Fleets can vary in the type of compute resources you use and how the fleet is managed. A fleet's size—the number of game sessions and players that it can support—depends on the number of compute resources that you give it. All Amazon GameLift fleets have the following characteristics:
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The game server processes that run on all fleets are integrated with the Amazon GameLift server SDK and communicate with the Amazon GameLift service in the same way. Game servers report their availability to host game sessions and players, respond to prompts to start or stop game sessions, and other interactions.
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Amazon GameLift handles game session placement for all fleets in the same way. Amazon GameLift keeps track of a fleet's game server status and chooses from available game servers to host a new game session. This process is used whether your game places game sessions on a single fleet or uses a game session queue to balance hosting across multiple fleets. With a queue, you can also customize placement decisions to consider factors such as resource cost and latency.
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All fleets support the use of a FlexMatch matchmaker in collaboration with a game session placement queue. The Amazon GameLift service receives player match requests, forms the matches, and passes them to the game session queue to find available game servers.
Amazon GameLift collects a wide range of fleet metrics. These include status metrics for computes and server processes, as well as usage metrics for game sessions and player activity. See the complete list of available metrics at Monitor Amazon GameLift with Amazon CloudWatch.
In Amazon GameLift, you can work with fleets with the following compute types:
How Amazon GameLift fleet creation works
When you request a new fleet, Amazon GameLift starts a workflow to create the fleet resource As Amazon GameLift completes each step of the workflow, Amazon GameLift updates the fleet's status and emits a series of events to communicates fleet creation progress.
Amazon GameLift uses two types of events. Fleet state transition events mark when the fleet status changes. Fleet creation events provide additional markers to help with debugging issues. You can track all events using the Amazon GameLift console or by calling the Amazon GameLift API operation DescribeFleetEvents. You can also track fleet and location status using DescribeFleetAttributes or DescribeFleetLocationAttributes.