Highlights:
- By dynamically scaling up and down to accommodate player counts, Google Cloud manages the underlying Kubernetes clusters with GKE Autopilot and Agones, ensuring the game server can function flawlessly.
- GKE Autopilot can integrate with other crucial cloud services, including analytics, matchmaking services, and customized network proxies.
According to Google Cloud, running worldwide multiplayer game servers on Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot is now a fully automated experience for game developers.
Software containers, which host the elements of contemporary agile applications, including video games, are managed and orchestrated through GKE, a cloud-based service. It provides a platform for creating and sustaining massively multiplayer online games. With GKE Autopilot, developers can access a fully-managed, serverless version of GKE, where Google automates all the overheads.
Game developers can now use GKE Autopilot to serve players worldwide, according to a blog post by Google Kubernetes Engine’s Senior Product Manager, Ishan Sharma.
He clarified that most developers don’t want to be concerned with the underlying cloud infrastructure. They simply want it to grow with player traffic so they can concentrate on adding new features to their games.
Sharma wrote, “At Google Cloud, we are fixated on making game launches boring by making GKE Autopilot the platform-of-choice for running game workloads for scalability, reliability, and automation.”
With the help of the brand-new, open-source game server orchestrator Agones, Google Cloud has made it possible to run dedicated game servers on GKE Autopilot.
The game server, which acts as the definitive source of the game’s state and to which players must connect to interact with the game, is one of the most important components of multiplayer games.
As a result, game servers must continue to function flawlessly at all times and connect thousands of players without any interruptions.
By dynamically scaling up and down to accommodate player counts, Google Cloud manages the underlying Kubernetes clusters with GKE Autopilot and Agones, ensuring the game server can function flawlessly. Developers are no longer required to worry about setting up the underlying infrastructure.
Sharma explained, “With traditional Kubernetes, this scaling requires resources and time for planning, rightsizing and bin-packing. You might overprovision node pools much earlier in anticipation of scaling up and keep those node pools running longer before scaling down. All this costs money.”
According to analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc., gaming is a key cloud application because it necessitates elasticity to provide gamers with the best experience, leading to unpredictably high and low usage.
He added, “Running the infrastructure for these gaming workloads manually quickly becomes an expensive endeavor, and mistakes are often made, leading to higher costs or a poorer gaming experience. So automated infrastructure, which Google Cloud now offers with GKE Autopilot, is critical. Combine this with Google’s super-fast network, and you have a very compelling platform for game workloads.”
Google made a number of justifications for why game designers ought to think about hosting their games on GKE Autopilot. Developers only pay for the CPU, memory, and storage their servers use with GKE Autopilot.
Therefore, there is no risk of incurring charges for unused capacity or operating system overheads and components. Google quotes a Forrester study demonstrating how GKE Autopilot can cut infrastructure costs by as much as 85% and boost developer productivity by as much as 45%.
Google emphasized that developers won’t be forced into using its cloud if they use GKE Autopilot. Sharma noted that many game developers use multiple-region cluster fleets, on-premises settings, and other cloud platforms to run workloads.
He noted that games remain portable and flexible because Agones is open source and GKE Autopilot is based on open-source Kubernetes.
Multitarget parallel deployment, a feature of Google Cloud that enables developers to roll out new features or updates in a particular area, is another advantage.
Therefore, before releasing the new feature to a larger audience, developers can build a new GKE cluster for a small area, deploy it, and gauge user reaction.
Finally, Sharma noted that GKE Autopilot could integrate with other crucial cloud services, including analytics, matchmaking services, and customized network proxies.