Google Cloud hopes game developers can now improve the online multiplayer experience for their players with a new cloud tool.
Game servers used for online play can now run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot using another new feature from the company, an open-source game server orchestrator called Argones. The combination of these two services allows Google Cloud to manage the Kubernetes clusters and scale up or down depending on the number of players connected to the server at any given time.
In a company blog post (opens in new tab)Senior Product Manager for GKE, Ishan Sharma, said, “At Google Cloud, we’re fixated on making game launches boring by making GKE Autopilot the platform of choice for running game workloads for scalability, reliability, and automation.”
Save time and money
Since the GKE Autopilot takes care of this scaling automatically, it should save developers time, effort, and money compared to using traditional Kubernetes approaches. Sharma gives an example: “You could overprovision node pools much sooner in anticipation of scaling up and let those node pools run longer before scaling down. All of this costs money.”
With the variability in traffic and workloads that characterize the day-to-day operation of a game server, Holger Mueller, an analyst at technology specialist Constellation Research, believes the cloud can prove its worth in these scenarios.
“Manually running the infrastructure for these gaming workloads quickly becomes expensive and mistakes are common,” he noted. “So the automated infrastructure that Google Cloud now offers with GKE Autopilot is critical. Combine this with Google’s high-speed network and you have a very attractive platform for gaming workloads.”
In embracing even more benefits of its new cloud hosting tools for game servers, Google says developers will only pay for the energy actually consumed by the hardware, so there’s no charge for unused potential. The company also refers to a internal study (opens in new tab) which claims to show that GKE Autopilot can reduce infrastructure costs by up to 85% and improve developer efficiency by as much as 45%.
Additionally, Sharma pointed out that developers won’t be bound to use just Google Cloud with GKE autopilot and Argones, as their open-source nature means games remain flexible and versatile when used in conjunction with other cloud and on-premises platforms. prem infrastructure.
Multitarget parallel deployment also allows developers to create a new GKE cluster in certain specified regions, if for example they only want to deploy certain updates and features to certain locations around the world, perhaps for trial runs before deploying out globally.