Amazon GameLift Anywhere fleets - Amazon GameLift
Anywhere fleet creation workflow

Amazon GameLift Anywhere fleets

Use Anywhere fleets when you want to take advantage of Amazon GameLift features with your own hosting resources. Anywhere fleets are commonly used as test environments for iterative development or alongside managed fleets in a hybrid hosting solution.

An Anywhere fleet consists of a set of compute resources (virtual or physical) that you supply and manage. Computes can reside in any geographic location with connectivity, from a local laptop to remote outposts. When setting up an Anywhere fleet, you add computes to the fleet by registering them through Amazon GameLift. Each compute is registered with its IP address (or DNS name) so that Amazon GameLift can establish a connection with it.

You deploy game server software to an Anywhere fleet by installing it on each compute and launching game server processes. Each launched game server process establishes a connection to the Amazon GameLift service and reports readiness to host a game session. You can use your existing configuration management and deployment tooling to handle initial deployment and host management tasks. There are a few additional tasks required for use with Amazon GameLift, including:

  • Register and deregister computes to add or remove them from the fleet.

  • Maintain up-to-date authentication tokens on all computes. Server processes on the compute use them when connecting to the Amazon GameLift service.

Note

Optionally deploy your Anywhere fleet with the Amazon GameLift Agent to automate these key management tasks. See Work with the Amazon GameLift Agent.

See these topics about how to set up and maintain Anywhere fleets:

Anywhere fleet creation workflow

For Anywhere fleets, Amazon GameLift sets up the fleet resource only. You set up and register computes with the fleet, and you install game server software and start game server processes to host game sessions.

  1. Amazon GameLift creates the fleet resource in the fleet's home Region. Fleet status and custom location status are set to New.

  2. Amazon GameLift begins writing events to the fleet event log.

  3. After the fleet resource is created. Amazon GameLift sets the fleet status to Active. At this point, you can register new computes with the fleet.