Amazon GameLift FleetIQ best practices - Amazon GameLift
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Amazon GameLift FleetIQ best practices

Amazon GameLift FleetIQ is a low-level logic layer that helps you manage Amazon EC2 resources for game hosting. In particular, Amazon GameLift FleetIQ optimizes the use of Spot Instances that are viable for game hosting by minimizing the chance that game sessions might be interrupted. It also provides basic game hosting functionality to track available game servers and route gameplay to low-cost, high-viability game servers.

Amazon GameLift FleetIQ as a standalone feature does not provide advanced features that are offered with the fullly managed Amazon GameLift solution, which also uses FleetIQ to minimize hosting costs. If you need features such as matchmaking, latency-based player routing, game session and player session management, and versioning, take a look at the Amazon GameLift solutions.

Here are some best practices that can help you get the most benefit from Amazon GameLift FleetIQ.

  • Use Amazon GameLift FleetIQ for session-based games. Amazon GameLift FleetIQ works best when it is constantly directing players onto instances that are least likely to have game session interruptions. Maintaining long-lived sessions interferes with the Amazon GameLift FleetIQ balancing process, which increases the likelihood that games sessions might be interrupted. The ideal workflow is for players to go from matchmaking (or server selection) into gameplay. When the game ends, players go back to matchmaking and are routed to another game server on a new instance. We recommend using Amazon GameLift FleetIQ for games with sessions under two hours.

  • Provide many instance types to choose from. When you set up a game server group, you provide a list of instance types to be used. The more instance types that you include, the greater flexibility Amazon GameLift FleetIQ has to use Spot Instances with high viability for game hosting. For example, you might list multiple sizes within the same instance family (c5.large, c5.xlarge, c5.2xlarge, c5.4xlarge). With larger instances, you can run more game servers on each instance, potentially lowering costs. With smaller instances, autoscaling can react faster to changes in player demand. Keep in mind that the list of desired instance types is not prioritized—an Auto Scaling group will use a balance of viable instance types to maintain the group's resiliency.

  • Test your game on all instance types. Ensure that your game server runs properly on every instance type that you configure for your game server group.

  • Use instance capacity weighting. If you configure your game server group to use a range of instance sizes (such as c5.2xlarge, c5.4xlarge, c5.12xlarge), include capacity weighting information for each instance type. For more information, see Instance Weighting for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling in the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide.

  • Place your game sessions using Amazon GameLift FleetIQ. When placing groups of players with game servers, use the Amazon GameLift API ClaimGameServer(). Amazon GameLift FleetIQ avoids placing players on instances with a higher chance of game session interruptions.

  • Report game server status to Amazon GameLift FleetIQ. Periodically report server health and utilization status with the Amazon GameLift API UpdateGameServer(). Maintaining accurate game server status helps Amazon GameLift FleetIQ place gameplay more efficiently. It also helps avoid terminating instances with active gameplay during Spot balancing activity.

  • Set up an autoscaling policy. You can create a target-tracking scaling policy that maintains your hosting capacity based on player utilization and anticipated demand. The Amazon GameLift FleetIQ metric PercentUtilizedGameServers is a measure of how much of your hosting capacity is currently in use. Most games want to maintain a buffer of unused game servers so that new players can get into a game quickly. You can create a scaling policy that maintains a certain buffer size, adding or removing instances as player demand fluctuates. For more information, see Target Tracking Scaling Policies in the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide.

  • Use different Amazon accounts for development and production environments. Separating your development and production configurations across accounts can reduce the risk of misconfiguration impacting live players.

  • Enable game session protection for game server groups in production. To protect your players, turn on game session protection and prevent active game sessions from being terminated early due to scaling or balancing activity.

  • Test your game on EC2 before integrating it with Amazon GameLift FleetIQ. We recommend getting your game up and running on EC2 and fine-tune your configuration first. You can then create a game server group using the same launch template and AMI.

    If you're using Kubernetes, we recommend first getting standard EC2 instances added to your Kubernetes cluster, then create a game server group using the launch template you create for worker nodes in your Kubernetes cluster. If you're using EKS, create your EKS cluster and game server group separately. For the game server group, use the EKS-optimized AMI with the appropriate user data and the launch template configuration used for your EKS integration. See more details about EKS worker nodes and the EKS optimized AMI in the Amazon EKS-Optimized Linux AMI guide.

  • Use the game server group balancing strategy ON_DEMAND_ONLY for reliable game server availability. With this balancing strategy in force, no Spot Instances are used. This is a useful tool to ensure server availability when you need it most, such as during feature launches or other special events. You can swtich a game server group from a Spot to an On-Demand strategy as needed.

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