Google Cloud Game Server | Managing Multi-player Games 

Today I am here with this article about google cloud game server, large-scale, multiplayer, online games and how Google Cloud's products can support these types of workloads for a player base that spans the world.

Google cloud game servers

 At the foundational level, google have Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE. The combination of having both a managed platform of GKE as well as the open-source nature of Kubernetes means that we can place our game infrastructure anywhere in the world that players show up, ensuring a low-latency, real-time experience for everyone. 

But Kubernetes is just the beginning. Another open source project you may be familiar with from Google Cloud is Agones. Agones is designed as a batteries-included, open-source, dedicated game server hosting and scaling project built on top of Kubernetes, with the flexibility you need to tailor it to the needs of your multiplayer game. 

Since going 1.0 in September 2019, Agones continues to grow its suite of tools specifically tailored to running multiplayer game servers on top of Kubernetes cluster. The relatively new offering in this suite of multiplayer game hosting tools is Google Cloud Game Servers, which is in public beta right now. Agones is a fantastic project that excels at writing dedicated game servers within a single Kubernetes cluster. 

What is Cloud Game Servers

 

Cloud Game Servers is a management layer that sits on top of Agones to power your global, multi-clustered game server workloads. It provides you with the ability to connect Kubernetes clusters from Google Cloud as well as hybrid and multi-cloud, not locking you into a single cloud provider. It also gives you a high degree of flexibility and control since you still have access to your underlying Kubernetes clusters. On top of that, powerful features provide visibility and simplicity in running, scaling, and orchestrating your game servers for your global player base. 

Google Cloud Game Server Core Concepts

First, a Game Server cluster, which is a Kubernetes cluster that has Agones installed and is registered with Google Cloud Game Servers. 

Secondly, you also need a way to logically group together your Game Server clusters in a way that makes sense for the latency requirements for your game. We call this concept realms. And it gives you the ability to group clusters as you see fit for retrieving ready Game Servers from across a realm via multi-cluster game server allocation. 

It can also be used as a target for all or some of your Game Server fleet deployments and updates. 

Finally, we have Game Server configurations and deployments. These are Agones-based configurations that are able to be deployed across some or all of your clusters around the globe, defining both your fleets of ready Game Servers as well as autoscaling capabilities. 

For example, if we had a project called Game X, we could split it across three separate realms, such as US, Europe, and Japan. Within each realm, we can have a series of Game Server clusters hosted on Google Cloud, On-prem, or potentially other clouds as well. 

Finally, we would roll out our fleets of ready Game Servers across our realms using Game Server deployments and configurations. 

Getting started with Google Cloud Game Servers 

 First, install Agones on your Kubernetes clusters and register them with Google Cloud Game Servers. 

Second, decide on how you want to organize your Game Server clusters into realms.

Finally, write and roll out your Game Server configurations and deployments to host and scale your Game Servers across all your Agones clusters around the world. 

Game Server Fleets Across Four Different Kubernetes Clusters

I previously set up four Game Server clusters, split between two realms- Europe and the United States. To roll out my global fleet, I'm first going to create my deployment and name it stk for the awesome open-source game Super Tax Cut that we're going to deploy.

 Next, we will create a configuration for this deployment, and we'll call it v1. we can see our configuration for our Cloud Game We'll create two replicas of our Super Tax Cut game server. This may look familiar if you've used Agones before. 

We could also create our autoscaling rules at this point if we so desired. The config and deployment have been created, but it has not yet been rolled out to all our clusters. So let's do that. Just click Manage Rollout and then select the config we want to roll out to all my clusters and hit Save. Let's now look at one of the clusters we've already connected to. And we can see our Game Server fleet has been spread across the clusters, and they're ready to go. 

To recap, we saw that we had a previously configured, global, multi-cluster, Agones deployment, which was already organized into two realms. From there, we were able to use the power of Google Cloud Game Servers to roll out our dedicated game servers across our global infrastructure. 

Conclusion 

This is just the tip of the iceberg of features for Google Cloud Game Servers. There is much more to explore- including multi-cluster allocation, aggregated metrics, and more. If you're interested in getting started with any of these projects, including Google Cloud Game Servers, then you can visit the official website of Google Cloud.