How to make sure there is a new server available for hosting instance when all servers are busy with matches.

Question

Hi, I am curious to know how to make sure a new server spins up when the current servers are in full throttle and a new player wants to join a game. Ideally a new server should spin up, create a game instance and accept the player. This is what I am looking for. When testing, in the scaling section, I have provided the min servers as 1, desired servers as 1 and max as 9. Buffer is set to 15%. I have player accepting set to DENY_ALL once match starts after lobby. When I tested my setup, I noticed that once match starts and player accept policy is set to DENY_ALL, no more players are able to join the game as max session instances in a server is set to 1 and since no more servers are spinning up for the new player, the new player is receiving response " Server is not accepting players at the moment". Instead, what I want to set up is AWS spinning up a new server, create a new instance and accept the player. How can I do that?

ShashankJ_AWS · Answer

Hi,

The [target based auto-scaling policy](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/fleets-autoscaling-target.html) is supposed to address your use case. By setting the buffer to 15% GameLift will ensure scale up whenever the percentage of AvailableGameSessions goes below 15%. But since you've set the max as 9, GameLift will only scale upto 9 instances. 
* A new instance will have processes that are capable of placing game sessions. To actually use these processes, you would have to call [CreateGameSession](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/apireference/API_CreateGameSession.html) or [StartGameSessionPlacement](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/apireference/API_StartGameSessionPlacement.html) before putting player sessions onto that game session. Have you verified that you are in fact creating new game sessions that players can utilize? Or are you attempting to place the new players onto the same game session that has the DENY_ALL policy?
* Have you verified the AvailableGameSessions metrics in the "Fleet metrics" tab on the console? This might help understand what's going on better.
* In addition to scaling, you can also create multiple game sessions on a single instance (maximum of 50 subjective to performance concerns). This can be done by setting the [RuntimeConfiguration](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/apireference/API_RuntimeConfiguration.html) on the fleet.

If this is not behaving as expected, I'd recommend creating a [support case](https://support.console.aws.amazon.com/support/home#/) so the service team can help further.

Thanks!

How to make sure there is a new server available for hosting instance when all servers are busy with matches.

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