Setting up Amazon GameLift queues for game session placement - Amazon GameLift
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Setting up Amazon GameLift queues for game session placement

A game session queue is the primary mechanism for processing new game session requests and locating available game servers to host them. Queues offer significant benefits for game developers and players. These include:

  • Queues provide best possible placement. When processing game session placement requests, a queue uses Amazon GameLift algorithms to prioritize queue locations based on a set of defined preferences.

  • Host games on lower-priced Spot fleets. Use queues to optimize use of Amazon Spot fleets, which offer significantly lower hosting costs. By default, queues always try to place new game sessions in Spot fleets.

  • Place new games faster during high demand. Queues use multiple possible locations for placements. This means that there is always fallback capacity if the preferred placement location is unavailable.

  • Make game availability more resilient. Outages can happen. With a multi-location queue, a slowdown or outage doesn't have to affect player access to your game.

  • Use extra fleet capacity more efficiently. To handle unexpected surges in player demand, queues provide quick access to extra hosting capacity. The fleet locations in a queue provide back-up capacity for each other. Locations scale up or down based on player demand.

  • 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 with queues, see Design a game session queue.