Game servers have a particular sort of challenge. They tend to swing from high usage to idle periods. This makes for both an excellent system in the cloud while also requiring a lot of configuration. Never fear, Amazon has an answer with their easy to use GameLift service.
Stick To What You Know
Game developers have a particular set of skills for building software. These skills are watered down if time is required to develop and configure their deployment infrastructure. This conundrum is much like the one faced by any solution deployed to the cloud. GameLift provides a quick start to a cloud environment tuned for performance and security.
Wide Support
There are some frameworks, libraries, and tools for game development. While Amazon has their lumberyard service, they serve more than that. Your development platform is not limited when you choose the GameLift service. They support all of the well-known environments including C/C++, unity, C#, and Unreal as well as LumberYard.
The support is not just a wink and a nod either. They provide examples and SDKs for these environments to help you get started quickly.
In A NutShell
This service is pretty technical. Thus, any serious consideration should include a review of the API and related documentation. In general, there is not much you have to learn for this platform. There are sessions and players. A session starts a server or joins one based on capacity; users are then added. Once the game is over, the session is closed and required services released. Therefore, your resources are spun up and down as needed to provide exactly what you need when you need it.
Amazon also provides a tutorial and game app to help you get comfortable with this service before making a large time investment. As with many of their services, this one may open your eyes to a whole new approach to deploying your application. Take a look and let us know how your experience goes, now its time to get back to that gaming.
