How do GameLift target-based policies work?

Question

Hi,

I'm looking into scaling options for my fleet and wanted to try target-based scaling (as the simplest option) first.

I set the buffer size to 50% (just for the sake of testing) but that doesn't seem to do anything. My fleet has a minimum of 2 instances and a maximum of 12. I would expect this setting to keep 6 instances spun up at all times. Again, this is not my production target, I'm just trying to get a feel for the feature so that I know whether it satisfies our requirements.

Am I misunderstanding how this setting works?

Thanks in advance

JamesM_AWS · Answer

Hi IngDanko,

This doc might help: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/apireference/API_PutScalingPolicy.html

> For example, you might choose to maintain a 10% buffer for a fleet that has the capacity to host 100 simultaneous game sessions. This policy tells Amazon GameLift to take action whenever the fleet's available capacity falls below or rises above 10 game sessions. Amazon GameLift will start new instances or stop unused instances in order to return to the 10% buffer.

The scaling policy is based on maintaining number of game sessions rather than number of instance, unless you only specify to host 1 game session per instance.

How do GameLift target-based policies work?

Relevant content