Amazon GameLift managed EC2 fleets - Amazon GameLift
Managed EC2 fleet creation workflow
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Amazon GameLift managed EC2 fleets

Amazon GameLift managed EC2 fleets offer cloud-based resources for production hosting with Amazon GameLift. With a managed fleet, you get the flexibility, security, and reliability of Amazon Web Services Cloud resources that are further optimized for multiplayer game hosting. The Amazon GameLift service provides robust host management tooling.

A managed EC2 fleet is a set of virtual computes that Amazon GameLift owns and operates on your behalf and based on your configuration choices. Computes are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that are physically located in Amazon Web Services Regions or Local Zones. When you create a fleet, you choose an EC2 instance type for your computes based on computing power, memory, storage, networking capabilities, and other factors.

With a managed EC2 fleet, you upload your game server build to Amazon GameLift. When you create a fleet, the service deploys your build to fleet computes and launches game server processes. Each launched game server process establishes a connection to the Amazon GameLift service and reports readiness to host a game session.

In addition to fleet deployment, Amazon GameLift handles the following host management tasks so you don't have to:

  • Tracks the status of all computes in the fleet and replaces stale or unhealthy computes.

  • Handles authentication for communication between server processes and the Amazon GameLift service.

  • Automatically starts and stops game server processes on each compute, based on your runtime configuration.

  • Offers auto-scaling tools to adjust fleet capacity dynamically to meet player demand.

  • Reports performance metrics for the fleet's EC2 instances.

See these topics about how to set up and maintain managed EC2 fleets:

Managed EC2 fleet creation workflow

For managed fleets, Amazon GameLift sets up the fleet resource and also deploys a set of compute resources with your game server software installed and running. When the creation workflow is complete and successful, the fleet has one active EC2 instance in the fleet home Region and one each in the fleet's remote locations. All instances have game are ready to host game sessions.

  1. Amazon GameLift creates the fleet resource in the fleet's home Region and sets desired capacity in each location to one (1) instance. Fleet and location status is set to New.

  2. Amazon GameLift begins writing events to the fleet event log.

  3. Amazon GameLift sets fleet status to Downloading and begins preparing the game server software for deployment.

    1. Gets the uploaded game server build and extracts the compressed files.

    2. Runs install scripts, if provided.

    3. Sets fleet status to Validating and begins verifying that no errors occurred when downloading and installing the build files.

  4. Amazon GameLift sets the fleet status to Building, configures fleet hardware, and allocates one EC2 instance for each fleet instance.

  5. Amazon GameLift sets the fleet status to Activating. Launches a game server process on each instance (based on the fleet's runtime instructions) and tests connectivity between the build and the Amazon GameLift service.

  6. When game server processes on each instance establish a connection and report readiness to host game sessions, Amazon GameLift sets fleet and location statuses to Active. At this point, the fleet is considered ready to host game sessions.