Amazon GameLift Revamped Fleet Creation: Improved Accuracy and Transparency in State Transitions

Hello Amazon GameLift Devs,

We are pleased to announce an update to the fleet creation process on Amazon GameLift EC2 instances, aimed at improving the transparency and accuracy of the information you receive during the fleet creation. When you create a new fleet—a collection of hardware resources designed to host your game sessions—the process involves multiple asynchronous steps. These steps help validate your configuration to get it ready to host game sessions, including making it easier to pinpoint and resolve issues faster

To improve visibility into this asynchronous process, we're rolling out an update to the state transitions displayed during fleet creation and adding key information to enhance your understanding of the overall process. Specifically, this update includes the following improvements:

1. State Transition Accuracy: We’ve overhauled state transitions updates to bring them in line with our public documentation. This ensures what you see in the AWS CLI and Console matches the actual state of your fleet, giving more meaningful updates throughout the fleet creation process.
2. BUILDING and ACTIVATING change: One of the most notable changes involves the BUILDING to ACTIVATING state transition. Previously, this transition occurred earlier in the process, sometimes leading to confusion about the availability of the GameLift EC2 instance. With this update, the transition to ACTIVATING will now occur later, specifically when your EC2 instance is available for SSM (AWS Systems Manager) access. This ensures you have a clear understanding of when the instance is ready for configuration or deployment. Once a fleet is activating, if there are any fleet creation failures, you can go into the instance and start debugging immediately.
3. Enhanced Event Notifications: We are adding and updating several events throughout the fleet creation process to provide more granular insights. For example, certain new fleet events like FLEET_CREATION_FAILED_INSTALLER and FLEET_CREATION_COMPLETED_INSTALLER will allow you to identify the time to run the installer and outcome of the script. This helps anticipate when resources will be operational, reduces fleet creation time, and improves the ability to debug failures.
4. Updated Documentation: We’ve updated our public documentation to reflect the new state transitions and events. The documentation now offers clear guidance on what to expect during each phase of fleet creation, making it easier to troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

To learn more, see the following resources:

• Release Notes
• API Reference
• Dev Guide (Fleet Creation)
• Dev Guide (Debug Fleets)

We believe these updates will enhance your experience by providing more accurate, timely, and useful information during fleet creation. As always, your feedback has been invaluable in driving these improvements, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts with us.

Mark Choi | PM, Amazon GameLift