Introduction

Publication date: November 19, 2021 (Document history)

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on five pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization — Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and AWS Partners to evaluate architectures, remediate risks, and implement designs that deliver business value.

In this Lens we focus on how to design, architect, and deploy your games workloads in the AWS Cloud. We define components, explore common workload scenarios, and outline design principles that help you to apply the Well-Architected Framework. We recommend that you begin designing your architecture by considering the best practices and questions from the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper. This document provides supplemental best practices for games industry customers.

This Lens specifies best practices that are intended to address the unique characteristics of building and operating games in the cloud based on our experience working with games industry developers and publishers around the world. It provides guidance on how to design and operate your environment so that it is cost optimized and scalable for fluctuations in global player demand. This Lens also provides guidance for securing your game infrastructure and tuning performance in order to deliver a positive player experience.

This document is intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), game studio technical directors, architects, developers, and operations team members. After reading this document, you will understand AWS best practices and strategies to use when designing architectures for games.

Custom lens availability

Custom lenses extend the best practice guidance provided by AWS Well-Architected Tool. AWS WA Tool allows you to create your own custom lenses, or to use lenses created by others that have been shared with you.

To determine if a custom lens is available for the lens described in this whitepaper, reach out to your Technical Account Manager (TAM), Solutions Architect (SA), or AWS Support.