Agones
Agones is an open source platform for hosting, scaling and managing multi-player game servers in Kubernetes. It simplifies game server operations and frees game developers to focus on building great games.
kubernetes
game-servers
scaling
open-source
Agones: Open Source Multi-Player Game Server Platform
Agones is an open source platform for hosting, scaling and managing multi-player game servers in Kubernetes. It simplifies game server operations and frees game developers to focus on building great games.
What is Agones?
Agones is an open source platform developed by Google to help game developers build, deploy and manage dedicated game servers on Kubernetes. It handles game server provisioning, scaling, session management and health checking out of the box so developers can focus on building game logic.
Key features of Agones include:
- Automatic scaling of game servers based on actual game traffic
- Support for custom game server builds as Docker containers
- Health checking and restarting for unhealthy game server instances
- Multiple options for session management and player joining
- Game server lifecycle management from Agon creation to shutdown
- Usage analytics and metrics for optimizing capacity planning
- Pluggable custom controllers and webhooks
Agones reduces the operational overhead of running multiplayer game backends by providing foundational capabilities on Kubernetes. This allows greater flexibility, portability and utilization for game server workloads. It is well suited for indie developers to large studios building the next multiplayer hit.
Agones Features
Features
- Kubernetes native - uses Kubernetes primitives for self-healing, auto-scaling, rolling updates etc
- Automatic scaling of game server fleets
- Health checking and lifecycle management of game servers
- Allocate game servers using Kubernetes native APIs
- SDKs for integration with game engines like Unity and Unreal
- Support for Windows and Linux game servers
- Metrics and monitoring via Prometheus
- Multiple cloud provider support including Google Cloud, AWS, Azure etc
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Leverages Kubernetes for efficient resource management and scaling
Reduces operational overhead for game developers
Integrates with major game engines
Open source and extensible
Cons
Requires expertise with Kubernetes for setup and management
Less flexible than building custom game server management
Limited to Kubernetes infrastructure
Official Links
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