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AWS Solutions Library

Overview

This Guidance helps game developers build persistent world games and host virtual worlds on AWS using Amazon GameLift and serverless backend components. The architecture uses managed and serverless components to reduce operational effort and scale based on player demand. Developers can use this architecture to get started with persistent virtual world game development on MacOS and Windows. This Guidance includes infrastructure as code (IaC) automation, configuration scripts for setting up dependencies, and a sample Unity client/server implementation. 

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Download the architecture diagram

Deploy with confidence

Ready to deploy? Review the sample code on GitHub for detailed deployment instructions to deploy as-is or customize to fit your needs.

Go to sample code

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) handles deployments and updates by using AWS CloudFormation to control resource updates and rollbacks. This reduces errors caused by manual configuration changes.

For Amazon GameLift  fleet updates, CloudFormation will create a replacement fleet. It will wait for the replacement to become fully active to accept traffic before terminating the old fleet.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

The game client uses Amazon Cognito Identity Pool identities to secure access to the back end services. This is achieved by signing the requests with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials provided by the Identity Pool. Only authenticated requests are allowed to the provided APIs hosted on API Gateway. Additionally, game clients are allowed to access only the data of their own account.

Read the Security whitepaper 

In case the game server (and consequently the game world) crashes, the architecture will automatically replace the world with a new one, which will have access to the same persisted data of that specific world.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

Amazon GameLift allows direct client to server communication to optimize near real time performance. The architecture allows developers to host game servers across multiple AWS Regions, reducing the latency between the game client and the server.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

The architecture leverages serverless components including API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB, which allow you to reduce costs by paying for the exact amount of resources based on player traffic. Additionally, Amazon GameLift can be configured to scale based on demand so you have a minimal set of unused resources running at any given time.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 
This architecture uses managed and serverless services to run only the resources required for the current player load, reducing your individual impact on the environment.
Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.