Fleet design#

When designing your fleet, you must consider the these factors:

• The number of fleets you want to have
• The availability requirements of your game
• How you want your fleet to scale up and down
• The machine requirements of your game
• The number of players you want on each game server
• The number of game servers you want on each machine

The following sections provide additional information about each of the core components of designing a fleet.

Number of fleets#

You’ll start with only a single fleet during the proof-of-concept (POC) stage of onboarding. However, as you advance through the onboarding process, it might make sense to add additional fleets to suit your fleet’s needs. You might want a designated fleet for each of your development environments (for example, production, development, staging), each of the platforms you support (for example, Xbox®, PlayStation®, PC), or both.

Availability#

To ensure your players have the best experience possible, you’ll want to configure your fleet to have machine capacity in each geographic region in which you have players. In fleet terms, these availability zones are called fleet regions. Each fleet region is a grouping of region locations within the geographic region and region-specific scaling settings.

In the illustration above, the example fleet has a fleet region for West Europe and Central United States (US). Each region has at least one bare metal location and one cloud location. Here, the cloud locations are all from Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Location redundancy#

For locations where resilience is a concern, Game Server Hosting recommends location redundancy. Location redundancy involves adding redundant suppliers in the same location to ensure that if one experiences problems, your players in that location can continue to play with no negative impact.

Cloud providers#

To enable your fleet to scale in and out of the cloud as the number of players fluctuates, you’ll need at least one cloud provider. Cloud providers are suppliers of virtual cloud machines, such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure.

Ideally, you’ll want cloud resources configured for each region location in which you have bare metal machines. Adding additional cloud providers has the potential to add resiliency and flexibility to your fleet. Still, it comes at the expense of keeping warm or cold capacity at each cloud provider. Work with your account manager to determine what makes the most sense for you and your game. Remember that you can always add more cloud providers later on.

Scaling settings#

Each fleet has a collection of scaling settings that, by default, apply to all fleet regions within the fleet. You can override most of the scaling settings per fleet region.

Mods#

A mod is a container of configuration information and settings that profiles inherit from. Mods work like templates for profiles; they provide a set of base settings—such as map lists, game types, exposed files, available game images, resource usages, custom settings, configuration files, and command-line parameters that profiles can inherit or overwrite. In a practical sense, it helps to think of mods as a way to keep separate configurations for each branch of a game title (for example, production, development, staging). You can have one or more mods associated with your game to manage different configuration needs.

Profiles#

A profile has configuration information that Game Server Hosting's system reads and applies to machines within a fleet. The configuration information includes identifiers for game images, command-line parameters, and game server instance settings. A fleet can have any number of profiles assigned to it at a time. However, each profile can only belong to a single fleet.

Machine options#

At the machine level, you have a variety of options available. You can choose the hardware specifications of the machine, the operating system running on the machines, the player density, the server density, and firmware options. Since there are different specifications and settings available on cloud instances than there are on bare metal machines, the options you select might differ between the two.

Hardware specifications#

There are hardware specifications available for bare metal machines and cloud instances. The bare metal hardware specifications differ little between bare metal suppliers, but cloud instance specifications can vary significantly between cloud providers.

For bare metal machines, you can define specifications such as CPU class, CPU cores, CPU frequency, RAM amount in GB, storage amount, storage type, and network bandwidth. You can also specify UEFI (Unified Extended Firmware Interface) configuration options.

For cloud instances, each provider has a collection of instance classifications with varying specifications for the CPU, RAM, and storage space. Each instance classification alters the cost of keeping standby capacity and scaling into the cloud.

Operating systems#

The two primary options available for operating systems are Microsoft Windows and Linux. The best option depends on the requirements of your game server binary. Within the two operating system groups, Game Server Hosting has support for a set number of distributions and versions.

Microsoft Windows#

Game Server Hosting supports the following Microsoft Windows operating system versions:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Microsoft Windows Server 2019

Linux#

Game Server Hosting supports the following Linux distributions:

• Ubuntu 18.4
• CentOS 9

Player density#

Player density refers to the number of players you can service per game server instance or per physical machine. Be mindful not to confuse player density with game server density, which is the number of game server instances you can host per physical machine.

Player density is the maximum number of players. There’s a game server player density, which is the maximum number of players that can join a game server per game session, and there’s a total player density, which is the total number of players that can join a machine at a time. The total player density is the game server density multiplied by the number of game servers on the machine.

Because of the specification differences, bare metal machines and cloud machines might have different server densities, and therefore, different total player densities.

Server density#

Server density is the maximum number of game servers that can exist on a machine at a time. The server density might vary between bare metal machines and cloud machines since the same specifications aren’t available for both.

Firmware options#

Some game servers run best with specific firmware options configured, such as turbo boost. Your account manager and solution engineer will work with you to ensure you have every machine in your fleet configured to best suit your game’s needs.