Amazon GameLift
Amazon Gamelift is a dedicated server platform for online video gaming. Notable customers include High Horse Entertainment, Wargaming Mobile, Gearbox Software, Aon Interactive and Proletariat, Inc. Amazon practically needs no introduction, as it's one of the largest companies in the world and a household name. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, is in the top 5 richest people on the planet. The company started over 20 years ago as a simple warehousing and shopping destination and has grown to be a web behemoth comparable to Google.
- Modular video game servers for session-based gameplay (MOBA, first person shooter, etc.
- Server management is provided by Amazon, who takes care of load balancing, instance monitoring and game server health
- Amazon will automatically replace unhealthy server instances to ensure smooth gameplay
- Servers can automatically scale their capacity depending on available sessions, average waiting time per player or idle instances.
- Advanced mechanisms can deploy up to thousands of instances at a time and deactivate unused instances in a matter of minutes to save costs and power
- Advanced distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are no problem on either the transport layer or frequently occurring network attacks.
- The service can be told to automatically scale capacity in order to absorb the sheer scale of DDoS offensives while keeping players playing
- Since Amazon's thousands of servers are located around the globe, players can expect low latency wherever they are.
- Amazon's sheer size makes this a very secure and stable option for gaming
- For that same reason, pricing is rather reasonable with the smallest packages costing less than $100 per month
- Pay As You Go plans keep developers from paying for features that will not be used
- Non-instance based multiplayer (DayZ, Rust, Conan: Exiles, etc.) is not supported
Online video gaming is a huge business, and developers with a clever idea can cash in and make millions virtually overnight. However, as a game's popularity takes off, a strong server solution is needed to keep data from bottlenecking. Naturally, Amazon, with its enormous amount of resources, offers the GameLift service to give developers and administrators a trusty and incredibly strong option to keep their games online. By using the extremely compatible Amazon GameLift software developer kit, programmers can get their game online even faster, as it could save thousands of hours of coding since the structure is already taken care of. Amazon's enhanced networking and enormous global reach ensures incredibly high packets per second, giving gamers ridiculously fast speed when playing with and against others. Amazon boasts 99.95% up-time, virtually guaranteeing that players will never be disconnected.
Alternatives to Amazon GameLift
BandiCam
Bitbucket
LibGDX
Rain
