Machine capacity
Documentation for Machine capacity
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The machine capacity of a fleet is the number of bare metal and cloud machines that host game servers within the fleet. Clanforge dynamically calculates the ideal blend of bare metal and cloud machines to optimize both performance and cost-efficiency. Refer to Cost optimization.
Comparison criteria | Bare metal capacity | Cloud capacity |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Less expensive (static prices) | More expensive (consumption-based prices) |
| Life cycle stages | Online, Provisioning, Ready, Allocation, Shutdown | Online, Provisioning, Ready, Allocation, Shutdown, Deletion |
| Commitment | Monthly commitment | No commitment |
| Provisioning time | 14-30 days | 1-15 minutes |
| Best for | Fleet baseline | Temporary increases in CCU |
Bare metal capacity
Bare metal capacity refers to the machine capacity that consists of physical machines. Physical machines typically reside in a traditional data center and have their operating systems installed directly on the machine’s hardware.
Costs and performance
Physical machines cost less than cloud machines in the long run. However, they require a longer financial commitment and take longer to provision. The qualities of bare metal machines make them ideal for a fleet baseline, but infeasible for adding new capacity quickly in response to increased player demand.Cloud capacity
Cloud capacity refers to virtual machines that exist in the cloud. Clanforge supports using cloud capacity at various cloud providers, including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Tencent. Cloud machines differ from bare metal machines in that they're typically virtual machines that the cloud provider manages and exposes through an API.
Costs and performance
Cloud machines are more expensive than bare metal machines but more flexible in that it’s easy to quickly add and remove cloud machines to overall fleet capacity. Clanforge can quickly respond to changes in player demand by adding or removing cloud capacity. The characteristics of cloud capacity make it ideal for serving daily user peaks, but costly to use for the bulk of the fleet capacity.Capacity management differences
Apart from the functional differences between bare metal and cloud capacity, there are also some differences in how Clanforge manages the two capacities under the hood. The primary difference is between the life cycle stages. Both machine capacity types go through similar life cycle stages, but bare metal machines don’t go through the deletion stage during the descaling process. When the reactive scaling system scales down cloud capacity, the final life cycle stage of a cloud machine is the deletion phase. In the deletion stage, the reactive descaler deletes the cloud machine instance through the cloud provider’s API. After the deletion phase, the cloud machine is unrecoverable.
Capacity readiness
All machine capacity, including bare metal and cloud machines, starts off as cold capacity. The machines that make up a fleet or fleet region’s cold capacity are clean slates. They're offline, haven’t been provisioned with Clanforge’s services, and don’t have any game images installed. When the reactive scaler prepares cold capacity, it powers on the machines, provisions the machines with Clanforge’s services, and installs all the requirements of your game. After a machine is ready for a game session, it’s part of the fleet or fleet region’s hot capacity. While scaling down capacity, the reactive scaling system shuts down unnecessary capacity before deleting it. The shutdown capacity remains in the shutdown state until it exceeds the configured shutdown TTL value. These machines in a shutdown state make up a fleet or fleet region’s warm capacity. The reactive scaling system can use warm capacity to respond to player demands faster than it can with cold capacity. Since the reactive scaling system has already provisioned the warm capacity machines, all it needs to do to prepare the machines for a game session is turn them on, and possibly install or update a game image. In contrast to warm and cold capacity, hot capacity consists of machines that are online, provisioned, and ready to fulfill an allocation.