AWS Compute Blog

Running your game servers at scale for up to 90% lower compute cost

This post is contributed by Yahav Biran, Chad Schmutzer, and Jeremy Cowan, Solutions Architects at AWS

Many successful video games such Fortnite: Battle Royale, Warframe, and Apex Legends use a free-to-play model, which offers players access to a portion of the game without paying. Such games are no longer low quality and require premium-like quality. The business model is constrained on cost, and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances offer a viable low-cost compute option. The casual multiplayer games naturally fit the Spot offering. With the orchestration of Amazon EKS containers and the mechanism available to minimize the player impact and optimize the cost when running multiplayer game-servers workloads, both casual and hardcore multiplayer games fit the Spot Instance offering.

Spot Instances offer spare compute capacity available in the AWS Cloud at steep discounts compared to On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances enable you to optimize your costs and scale your application’s throughput up to 10 times for the same budget. Spot Instances are best suited for fault-tolerant workloads. Multiplayer game-servers are no exception: a game-server state is updated using real-time player inputs, which makes the server state transient. Game-server workloads can be disposable and take advantage of Spot Instances to save up to 90% on compute cost. In this blog, we share how to architect your game-server workloads to handle interruptions and effectively use Spot Instances.

Characteristics of game-server workloads

Simply put, multiplayer game servers spend most of their life updating current character position and state (mostly animation). The rest of the time is spent on image updates that result from combat actions, moves, and other game-related events. More specifically, game servers’ CPUs are busy doing network I/O operations by accepting client positions, calculating the new game state, and multi-casting the game state back to the clients. That makes a game server workload a good fit for general-purpose instance types for casual multiplayer games and, preferably, compute-optimized instance types for the hardcore multiplayer games.

AWS provides a wide variety for both compute-optimized (C5 and C4) and general-purpose (M5) instance types with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. Because capacities fluctuate independently for each instance type in an Availability Zone, you can often get more compute capacity for the same price when using a wide range of instance types. For more information on Spot Instance best practices, see Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

One solution that customers use for running dedicated game-servers is Amazon GameLift. This solution deploys a fleet of Amazon GameLift FleetIQ and Spot Instances in an AWS Region. FleetIQ places new sessions on game servers based on player latencies, instance prices, and Spot Instance interruption rates so that you don’t need to worry about Spot Instance interruptions. For more information, see Reduce Cost by up to 90% with Amazon GameLift FleetIQ and Spot Instances on the AWS Game Tech Blog.

In other cases, you can use game-server deployment patterns like containers-based orchestration (such as Kubernetes, Swarm, and Amazon ECS) for deploying multiplayer game servers. Those systems manage a large number of game-servers deployed as Docker containers across several Regions. The rest of this blog focuses on this containerized game-server solution. Containers fit the game-server workload because they’re lightweight, start quickly, and allow for greater utilization of the underlying instance.

Why use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances?

A Spot Instance is the choice to run a disposable game server workload because of its built-in two-minute interruption notice that provides graceful handling. The two-minute termination notification enables the game server to act upon interruption. We demonstrate two examples for notification handling through Instance Metadata and Amazon CloudWatch. For more information, see “Interruption handling” and “What if I want my game-server to be redundant?” segments later in this blog.

Spot Instances also offer a variety of EC2 instances types that fit game-server workloads, such as general-purpose and compute-optimized (C4 and C5). Finally, Spot Instances provide low termination rates. The Spot Instance Advisor can help you choose a good starting point for determining which instance types have lower historical interruption rates.

Interruption handling

Avoiding player impact is key when using Spot Instances. Here is a strategy to avoid player impact that we apply in the proposed reference architecture and code examples available at Spotable Game Server on GitHub. Specifically, for Amazon EKS, node drainage requires draining the node via the kubectl drain command. This makes the node unschedulable and evicts the pods currently running on the node with a graceful termination period (terminationGracePeriodSeconds) that might impact the player experience. As a result, pods continue to run while a signal is sent to the game to end it gracefully.

Node drainage

Node drainage requires an agent pod that runs as a DaemonSet on every Spot Instance host to pull potential spot interruption from Amazon CloudWatch or instance metadata. We’re going to use the Instance Metadata notification. The following describes how termination events are handled with node drainage:

  1. Launch the game-server pod with a default of 120 seconds (terminationGracePeriodSeconds). As an example, see this deploy YAML file on GitHub.
  2. Provision a worker node pool with a mixed instances policy of On-Demand and Spot Instances. It uses the Spot Instance allocation strategy with the lowest price. For example, see this AWS CloudFormation template on GitHub.
  3. Use the Amazon EKS bootstrap tool (/etc/eks/bootstrap.sh in the recommended AMI) to label each node with its instances lifecycle, either nDemand or Spot. For example:
    • OnDemand: “–kubelet-extra-args –node labels=lifecycle=ondemand,title=minecraft,region=uswest2”
    • Spot: “–kubelet-extra-args –node-labels=lifecycle=spot,title=minecraft,region=uswest2”
  4. A daemon set deployed on every node pulls the termination status from the instance metadata endpoint. When a termination notification arrives, the `kubectl drain node` command is executed, and a SIGTERM signal is sent to the game-server pod. You can see these commands in the batch file on GitHub.
  5. The game server keeps running for the next 120 seconds to allow the game to notify the players about the incoming termination.
  6. No new game-server is scheduled on the node to be terminated because it’s marked as unschedulable.
  7. A notification to an external system such as a matchmaking system is sent to update the current inventory of available game servers.

Optimization strategies for Kubernetes specifications

This section describes a few recommended strategies for Kubernetes specifications that enable optimal game server placements on the provisioned worker nodes.

  • Use single Spot Instance Auto Scaling groups as worker nodes. To accommodate the use of multiple Auto Scaling groups, we use Kubernetes nodeSelector to control the game-server scheduling on any of the nodes in any of the Spot Instance–based Auto Scaling groups. 
    nodeSelector:
     lifecycle: spot
        title: your game title
  • The lifecycle label is populated upon node creation through the AWS CloudFormation template in the following section: 
    BootstrapArgumentsForSpotFleet:
	Description: Sets Node Labels to set lifecycle as Ec2Spot
	    Default: "--kubelet-extra-args --node-labels=lifecycle=spot,title=minecraft,region=uswest2"
	
	    Type: String
  • You might have a case where the incoming player actions are served by UDP and masking the interruption from the player is required. Here, the game-server allocator (a Kubernetes scheduler for us) schedules more than one game server as target upstream servers behind a UDP load balancer that multicasts any packet received to the set of game servers. After the scheduler terminates the game server upon node termination, the failover occurs seamlessly. For more information, see “What if I want my game-server to be redundant?” later in this blog.

Reference architecture

The following architecture describes an instance mix of On-Demand and Spot Instances in an Amazon EKS cluster of multiplayer game servers. Within a single VPC, control plane node pools (Master Host and Storage Host) are highly available and thus run On-Demand Instances. The game-server hosts/nodes uses a mix of Spot and On-Demand Instances. The control plane, the API server is accessible via an Amazon Elastic Load Balancing Application Load Balancer with a preconfigured allowed list.

What if I want my game server to be redundant?

A game server is a sessionful workload, but it traditionally runs as a single dedicated game server instance with no redundancy. For game servers that use TCP as the transport network layer, AWS offers Network Load Balancers as an option for distributing player traffic across multiple game servers’ targets. Currently, game servers that use UDP don’t have similar load balancer solutions that add redundancy to maintain a highly available game server.

This section proposes a solution for the case where game servers deployed as containerized Amazon EKS pods use UDP as the network transport layer and are required to be highly available. We’re using the UDP load balancer because of the Spot Instances, but the choice isn’t limited to when you’re using Spot Instances.

The following diagram shows a reference architecture for the implementation of a UDP load balancer based on Amazon EKS. It requires a setup of an Amazon EKS cluster as suggested above and a set of components that simulate architecture that supports multiplayer game services. For example, this includes game-server inventory that captures the running game-servers, their status, and allocation placement.The Amazon EKS cluster is on the left, and the proposed UDP load-balancer system is on the right. A new game server is reported to an Amazon SQS queue that persists in an Amazon DynamoDB table. When a player’s assignment is required, the match-making service queries an API endpoint for an optimal available game server through the game-server inventory that uses the DynamoDB tables.

The solution includes the following main components:

  • The game server (see mockup-udp-server at GitHub). This is a simple UDP socket server that accepts a delta of a game state from connected players and multicasts the updated state based on pseudo computation back to the players. It’s a single threaded server whose goal is to prove the viability of UDP-based load balancing in dedicated game servers. The model presented here isn’t limited to this implementation. It’s deployed as a single-container Kubernetes pod that uses hostNetwork: true for network optimization.
  • The load balancer (udp-lb). This is a containerized NGINX server loaded with the stream module. The load balance upstream set is configured upon initialization based on the dedicated game-server state that is stored in the DynamoDB table game-server-status-by-endpoint. Available load balancer instances are also stored in a DynamoDB table, lb-status-by-endpoint, to be used by core game services such as a matchmaking service.
  • An Amazon SQS queue that captures the initialization and termination of game servers and load balancers instances deployed in the Kubernetes cluster.
  • DynamoDB tables that persist the state of the cluster with regards to the game servers and load balancer inventory.
  • An API operation based on AWS Lambda (game-server-inventory-api-lambda) that serves the game servers and load balancers for an updated list of resources available. The operation supports /get-available-gs needed for the load balancer to set its upstream target game servers. It also supports /set-gs-busy/{endpoint} for labeling already claimed game servers from the available game servers inventory.
  • A Lambda function (game-server-status-poller-lambda) that the Amazon SQS queue triggers and that populates the DynamoDB tables.

Scheduling mechanism

Our goal in this example is to reduce the chance that two game servers that serve the same load-balancer game endpoint are interrupted at the same time. Therefore, we need to prevent the scheduling of the same game servers (mockup-UDP-server) on the same host. This example uses advanced scheduling in Kubernetes where the pod affinity/anti-affinity policy is being applied.

We define two soft labels, mockup-grp1 and mockup-grp2, in the podAffinity section as follows:

      affinity:
        podAntiAffinity:
          requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
            - labelSelector:
                matchExpressions:
                  - key: "app"
                    operator: In
                    values:
                      - mockup-grp1
              topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"

The requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution tells the scheduler that the subsequent rule must be met upon pod scheduling. The rule says that pods that carry the value of key: “app” mockup-grp1 will not be scheduled on the same node as pods with key: “app” mockup-grp2 due to topologyKey: “kubernetes.io/hostname”.

When a load balancer pod (udp-lb) is scheduled, it queries the game-server-inventory-api endpoint for two game-server pods that run on different nodes. If this request isn’t fulfilled, the load balancer pod enters a crash loop until two available game servers are ready.

Try it out

We published two examples that guide you on how to build an Amazon EKS cluster that uses Spot Instances. The first example, Spotable Game Server, creates the cluster, deploys Spot Instances, Dockerizes the game server, and deploys it. The second example, Game Server Glutamate, enhances the game-server workload and enables redundancy as a mechanism for handling Spot Instance interruptions.

Conclusion

Multiplayer game servers have relatively short-lived processes that last between a few minutes to a few hours. The current average observed life span of Spot Instances in US and EU Regions ranges between a few hours to a few days, which makes Spot Instances a good fit for game servers. Amazon GameLift FleetIQ offers native and seamless support for Spot Instances, and Amazon EKS offers mechanisms to significantly minimize the probability of interrupting the player experience. This makes the Spot Instances an attractive option for not only casual multiplayer game server but also hardcore game servers. Game studios that use Spot Instances for multiplayer game server can save up to 90% of the compute cost, thus benefiting them as well as delighting their players.