Development roadmap for hosting with Amazon GameLift Servers managed EC2

This roadmap guides you through how to develop an Amazon GameLift Servers managed EC2 hosting solution for your multiplayer game. Amazon GameLift Servers offers several game hosting options; for more information on these options, see Amazon GameLift Servers solutions.

With Amazon GameLift Servers managed hosting, your game server is hosted on Amazon Web Services Cloud-based virtual computing resources that Amazon GameLift Servers owns and operates based on your configuration. You get the security, reliability, and global availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that are further optimized for use with multiplayer game hosting. Amazon GameLift Servers streamlines hosting management with tools such as automatic server deployments, life cycle handling, and capacity auto-scaling.

An Amazon GameLift Servers managed solution is composed of the following components:

One or more Amazon GameLift Servers managed fleets, which use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances optimized for multiplayer game hosting.
A game server build, integrated with the server SDK for Amazon GameLift Servers, to deploy across all fleets.
A game client and backend service, integrated with the Amazon SDK, to interact with the Amazon GameLift Servers service and request game sessions.
An Amazon GameLift Servers queue to place new game sessions with available game servers across all fleets.
(Optional) A FlexMatch matchmaker to create multi-player matches and set up game sessions for them.

This roadmap presents a streamlined path to getting your multiplayer game up and running successfully with Amazon GameLift Servers managed EC2 hosting. After you have the necessary components in place, you can continue to iterate on game development and customize your hosting solution. As you get closer to launch, see these Preparing your game for launch with Amazon GameLift Servers hosting for help with preparing your hosting solution for production-level usage.

Get a jump start with the Amazon GameLift Servers plugin for Unreal Engine and Unity

Use the Amazon GameLift Servers plugins to integrate your game project and build a container fleet from inside your game engine's development environment. The plugin's guided workflows help you create a fast, simple solution with cloud-based hosting using managed EC2 fleets. Then you can build on this foundation to create a custom hosting solution for your game.

Add functionality to your game server so that it can communicate with the Amazon GameLift Servers service when it's deployed for hosting.

Get the server SDK for Amazon GameLift Servers for your game project. The server SDK is available in C++, C#, and Go. Download a Amazon GameLift Servers server SDK.
Modify your game server code to add server SDK functionality. For guidance, see Integrate games with custom game servers. At a minimum, do the following:
- Add code to initialize the Amazon GameLift Servers SDK and establish a WebSocket connection with the Amazon GameLift Servers service. Use the server SDK action InitSdk().
- Add code to report to the Amazon GameLift Servers service when the server process is ready to host game sessions. Use the server SDK action ProcessReady().
- Implement the required callback functions OnProcessTerminate(), and OnStartGameSession(). With these functions, game server processes can maintain a connection with the Amazon GameLift Servers service, initiate a game session when prompted by Amazon GameLift Servers, and respond to a prompt to end the game server process.
- Add code to report to the Amazon GameLift Servers service when the server process is ending a game session. Use the server SDK action ProcessEnding().
Package your game server build. Create an install script with your build files, dependencies and supporting software. See Package your game build files. We recommend using an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket to store versions of your game build.
Test your game server integration. See Test your integration using Amazon GameLift Servers Local.

Create a way for your game client to request to join a game session, get connection info, and then connect directly to a hosted game session. The most common approach is to set up backend service functionality that serves as a middleman between your game client and the Amazon GameLift Servers service. This approach protects your hosting resources and gives you greater control over how players are placed into game sessions.

Build backend service functionality for hosting. The backend service communicates with the Amazon GameLift Servers service and delivers connection information to a game client. This functionality includes starting game sessions, placing players into games, and retrieving game session information. For guidance, see Integrate games with custom game servers. At a minimum, do the following:
- Get the Amazon SDK for Amazon GameLift Servers and add it to your backend service project. See Amazon GameLift Servers SDK resources for client services.
- Add code to initialize an Amazon GameLift Servers client and store key settings. See Set up Amazon GameLift Servers on a backend service.
- Add functionality to call the Amazon SDK action CreateGameSession() and provide game session connection information to a game client. See Create a game session on a specific fleet.
  
  Calling CreateGameSession() is a convenient starting point for requesting new game sessions, After you have a game session placement system in place (see Step 3), you'll replace this code with a call to StartGameSessionPlacement() (or StartMatchmaking() if you're using FlexMatch).
  
  For guidance on designing your backend service, see Design your game client service.
Add functionality to your game client that lets players join a hosted game session. The game client makes requests to your backend service, not directly to Amazon GameLift Servers. After the backend service provides game session connection information, the game client connects directly with the game session to play the game.
Test your game client integration. See Test your integration using Amazon GameLift Servers Local.

Customize how you want Amazon GameLift Servers to process requests for new game session and locate available game servers to host them. Amazon GameLift Servers automatically tracks the availability of all game servers on all fleets. When a game client sends a request to join a game session, Amazon GameLift Servers looks for the "best possible" placement based on a set of defined priorities such as minimum latency, cost, and availability.

Create a game session queue for placing new game session with available game servers. Queues are the primary mechanism for game session placement. For guidance, see Create a game session queue.
In your backend service code, convert the CreateGameSession() call to StartGameSessionPlacement(). See Create a game session in a multi-location queue.
Create a mechanism to notify a game client when a game session is ready to join. While in development, you can poll for game session status using a call to DescribeGameSessionPlacement. Before using a queue to process high volumes, however, you'll need to enable event notifications. See Set up event notification for game session placement.
(Optional) Add FlexMatch matchmaking components. For guidance, see the Amazon GameLift ServersFlexMatch developer guide.

The final piece of your solution is to set up the type of hosting resources you'll need for a production system. To start planning and configuring for production, you want to transition to working with an Amazon GameLift Servers managed fleet.

Package your game server build and upload to Amazon GameLift Servers. Create an install script with your build files, dependencies and supporting software. See Deploy a custom server build for Amazon GameLift Servers hosting. You can upload your build to Amazon GameLift Servers using either the console or the Amazon CLI.

Before uploading your build, decide in what Amazon Web Services Region you want to create a fleet. You must upload the build to the same Region. For more on choosing a fleet location, see Fleet location.
Create a managed EC2 fleet. When you create a fleet, Amazon GameLift Servers immediately begins deploying your game server build for hosting. You can configure many aspects of a managed fleet. For guidance, see Create an Amazon GameLift Servers managed EC2 fleet. At minimum, do the following:
- Give the fleet a name and specify which uploaded game build to deploy.
- Choose On-Demand Instances for your fleet and select an instance type that's available in your fleet location. Spot fleets are a valuable option but require additional design and configuration.
- Create a runtime configuration for the fleet. At minimum, specify the launch path for your game server executable.
- Specify port settings to allow inbound traffic to access your game servers.
Add the managed fleets to your queue. In your game session queue, add your managed fleets.
Test game hosting with your managed fleets. At this point you should be able to test the entire hosting cycle, with a game client requesting a game session, getting connection info, and successfully connecting to a game session.

As you prepare for game launch, you'll need to fine-tune your managed hosting resources. Some of the decisions to consider include:

Consider adding Spot fleets for cost savings. See Tutorial: Create an Amazon GameLift Servers queue with Spot Instances.
If your game server needs to communicate other Amazon resources, set up IAM roles to manage access. See Communicate with other Amazon resources from your fleets.
Determine where geographically you want to position game servers. Add remote locations to your managed fleets. See Customize your Amazon GameLift Servers EC2 managed fleets.
Optimize fleet performance by selecting an instance type and size and configuring the runtime to run multiple server processes. See Manage how Amazon GameLift Servers launches game servers.
Experiment with game session placement options for managed fleets, including customizing prioritization settings. See Customize a game session queue.
Set up automatic capacity scaling to meet expected player demand. See Scaling game hosting capacity with Amazon GameLift Servers.
Set up standby fleets in other Amazon Web Services Regions and modify queues and auto scaling to handle failovers if needed.
Set up hosting observability tools, including analytics and logging. See Monitoring Amazon GameLift Servers.
Automate your deployment using infrastructure as code (IaC). See Managing Amazon GameLift Servers hosting resources using Amazon CloudFormation.

Amazon GameLift Servers supports the use of Amazon CloudFormation templates for any deployment-specific configurations. You can also use the Amazon Cloud Development Kit (Amazon CDK) to define your Amazon GameLift Servers resources. For more information about the Amazon CDK, see the Amazon Cloud Development Kit (Amazon CDK) Developer Guide.

To manage the deployment of your Amazon CloudFormation stacks, we recommend using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools and services such as Amazon CodePipeline. These tools help you deploy automatically or with approval whenever you build game server binary. With a CI/CD tool or service, resources deployment for a new game server version can look like this:
- Build and test your game server binary.
- Upload the binary to Amazon GameLift Servers.
- Deploy new fleets with the new build.
- Add the new fleets to your game session queue and remove the fleets with the previous build version.
- When the fleets with the previous build are no longer hosting active game sessions, delete the Amazon CloudFormation stacks of those fleets.

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Integrate a Unity game client

Preparing games for Amazon GameLift Servers