Scaling example#

Consider the following scaling example. You have a single fleet of five bare metal machines with the option to scale by adding cloud machines from a cloud provider. The fleet has a server density of 12, so each machine can host 12 game servers.

For simplicity, the fleet only has a single fleet region in which all machines reside. The following table shows the configuration values of the fleet region.

The minimum available servers value is 24 because that’s the minimum number of game servers that should always be available for new players to join. The minimum servers value is set to 60 because that’s how many game servers exist on the five bare metal machines in the fleet. It's worth noting that the minimum available servers value doesn't necessarily need to equal the number of game servers running on bare metal machines.

If all the game servers on the five bare metal machines are in use, then the reactive scaler introduces two cloud machines to ensure that there are 24 available game servers. If only four of the bare metal machines are in use, then that would leave only one machine available with 12 available game servers. To reach the required 24 available game servers, the reactive scaler would add one cloud machine with 12 game servers.

When players end game sessions and game servers become available again, the descaler monitors the time the game servers that have been unused and compare it against the shutdown TTL value. The descaler shuts down a machine when all the game servers on it have been unused for at least the amount of time specified by the shutdown TTL. When a machine is in the shutdown state, it's considered warm capacity. After a cloud machine has been in the shutdown state for longer than the delete TTL, the descaler deletes the cloud machine.