Amazon GameLift now supports containers for building, deploying and running on GameLift

Hello Amazon GameLift Devs,

Today, the Amazon GameLift team is excited to announce that Amazon GameLift now supports containers for building, deploying, and running game server packages. With today’s GA launch, customers will be able to provide Amazon GameLift container images and create a fleet that can operate and scale these containers. Combining containers with Amazon GameLift allows developers to develop their code in an environment and deploy them to GameLift, without having to worry about any mismatches between their development and production environments. This allows customers to iterate and deploy faster while building their game server hosting implementation on Amazon GameLift, and easily scale production fleets to meet player demand.

The introduction of containers on Amazon GameLift brings multiple additional improvements. With container fleets, the fleet creation is separated from the deployment of game server builds. This means you can provision a global fleet and deploy new versions of your game server on it with rolling updates. In most instances, the creation of a fleet takes about three minutes. The time to deploy a new game server version on the fleet after this is approximately five minutes. This makes production updates faster, and reduces the need to host separate customized development environments for quick iteration.

We heard from customers that support for Docker containers is a key feature that unlocks adoption of Amazon GameLift, as well as an ease-of-use feature that they can use to accelerate their development cycle. Containers package up the entire runtime environment - all the code, dependencies, and configuration files needed to run the game server. With container support on Amazon GameLift, customers can seamlessly move game server builds between their local machines for testing, staging environments, and production deployments without worrying about missing dependencies or configuration drift. Containers also allow efficient use of resources by running multiple isolated game servers on the same host machine. Overall, containerization simplifies the deployment process, enables consistent and secure environments, and optimizes resources utilization for game server builds.

To learn more about the containers support on Amazon GameLift, see the following resources:

• What’s New post
• Release notes
• Documentation
• AWS for Games Blog

Mark Choi | PM, Amazon GameLift