Game image roll-up frequency#

The frequency at which you should roll-up your game image (in other words, release a full image update) varies based on your unique requirements. You should consider how much disk space you have on your machines, the size of your game image, and how often you scale into the cloud.

The recommended best practice is that you release full image versions during every image update, reserving differential updates for time-sensitive hotfixes and other urgent updates. When machines are first provisioned in bare metal or cloud, they begin by downloading the most recent full image and then proceed to download all newer differential updates. Therefore, each additional differential update on top of a full image causes machine boot times and initial network bandwidth consumption to increase.

	Pros	Cons
Differential update	Rolls out faster to bare metal machines in your fleet	Increases the overall size of the game image Increases the time it takes to initialize cloud instances
Full image update	Decreases the overall size of the game image Decreases the time it takes to initialize cloud instances	Rolls out slower