Fleet hierarchy#

This topic details the hierarchical structure of the fleet object, the subcomponents within it, and the relationships between the subcomponents. Fleet objects have the following subcomponents:

• Fleet regions
• Region locations
• Machines
• Game servers

It’s important to understand the hierarchical structure of a fleet before designing a fleet for your game. A fleet is a topic-level logical grouping of regions, locations, game servers, and scaling settings.

Fleet regions#

A fleet can have one or more fleet regions, but each fleet region can only reside within a single fleet. Fleet regions are logical containers for region locations and region-specific scaling settings.

Region locations#

Region locations are specific geographic locations within each fleet region. For example, a Central United States fleet region might have a region location for Dallas, Texas and Jackson, Mississippi. Fleet regions can have one or many region locations, but it's most common for a fleet region to contain many locations. You might even incorporate redundant locations from different data centers to add resiliency to your fleet region.

Machines#

Each fleet region location has machines, or compute capacity, from either a single cloud provider or a collection of bare-metal data centers in the location.

A machine can be:

• A physical machine in a bare-metal data center
• A virtual cloud machine from a cloud provider

Machines exist within region location, and each region location can have one or more machines. To enable cloud scaling in a region location, you’ll need a bare-metal location for bare-metal machines and a cloud location for cloud machines.

Game servers#

Each machine has a set of game servers. Players can join manually via a server select client or automatically via a matchmaker. A machine can have one or more game servers within it, but typically each machine has a set number of game server instances based on cost efficiency. The number of game servers per machine is the server density.