GCAP 2017

Awesome! You’ve built the next Overwatch! You have your game client, and your dedicated game server to power each of these game sessions as your players duke it out in your new game.

Now you’ve just got to write code to spin up a game server for each match, power up machines to run those game servers, autoscale them based on server load, handle log aggregation, health checking, deploying new versions of your game servers, and…

Wow. That’s a lot.

The good news is, there are open source projects that can solve almost all the problems outlined above, for both dedicated game servers as well as their supporting applications, such as matchmaking and account management. Namely software containers with Docker and the Kubernetes project to help orchestrate them.

Kubernetes allows us to take advantage of the abstraction that containers provides over any kind of software, and thereby gives us common solutions for deployment, health checking, logging, scaling and more. In this talk we will look at the basics of how these two projects work, and how they can be used to scale, and autoscale, both our game servers and their supporting infrastructure, with relatively low effort compared to coding this infrastructure by hand. Finally we will run a Unity based multiplayer game on our newly built infrastructure, so you can see it all in action!