Getting Started with GameFabric: Environments & Regions

Welcome to Getting Started with GameFabric!

When you’re through with this step-by-step guide, you’ll have both an Environment and Region set up in GameFabric, ready for your first game server deployment.

What you’ll need:

• Access to your GameFabric installation with permissions to create Environments and Regions.

An Environment is a hard boundary between your different infrastructure stages. Everything inside an Environment (your Regions, game servers, and configurations) is completely isolated from everything in another Environment, allowing duplicate names to exist across Environments (e.g., Environments ‘prod’ and ‘stge’ can both have a Region called eu-west without conflict).

Regions are what fill an Environment with actual capacity. They’re infrastructure providers that are typically grouped at a region level, holding your game servers. It’s here where you’ll define how bare metal and cloud capacity are prioritized relative to each other.

You’ll need both before you can deploy anything.

Let’s get started.

Inside your GameFabric UI, go to ‘Environments’ in the left sidebar.

In the main panel on the Environments page, click ‘+ Create Environment’ in the top-right corner.

Then, fill in the required fields (marked with a red star ‘*’):

Name — A short identifier, maximum 4 characters. Common choices are prod, stge, dev. 

• This is used in API calls and internal references, so best to keep it clean.

• Display Name — The readable label you and your team will see across the UI.

• Description (optional) — This is worth filling in when your team is managing multiple environments.

You’ll also see ‘Annotations.’ These let you attach region-specific metadata (like backend URLs or storage bucket names) that your game servers can read at startup. We won’t be needing them right now, so you can go ahead and proceed.

Once your fields are filled in, click ‘Create Environment’ at the bottom.

Your Environment is now set up and ready for action!

You’ll see your active Environments at the top of the navbar in the UI once you click out of the ‘Environments’ page. These are quickly swappable with a click.

Now, to pair your new Environment with a Region.

Make sure your Environment is selected in the top bar. Then, scroll down to the ‘Regions’ page on the sidebar and select it.

You’ll land on the following page. Same as with Environments, click on the ‘+ Create Region’ button at the top right of the Regions panel.

A field box will appear prompting you to fill in some choice information.

First, give your region a Name (something like eu-west or us-east). You can also provide a Display Name, which allows for a longer descriptor without any character limits.

It’s also wise to fill in the Description field to make it explicitly clear where this Region is servicing and with what infrastructure.

If you have an Allocator with your GameFabric installation, you can also attach it here. This assists with game server capacity distribution.

Go ahead and click Next to select your Region Types.

On this second page of the Create Region box, you’ll get to choose how you want to set up your capacity with Region Types. This is where you tell GameFabric how to distribute game servers across your available infrastructure.

In other words, a Region Type is a classification of your capacity within a given Region; for example, bare metal and/ or cloud. You assign each Type a priority. Lower number fills first.

One Region can hold multiple Types. Each one maps to a class of infrastructure and a set of Locations (geographic groupings of Sites, the underlying clusters of bare metal or cloud servers). GameFabric fills the highest-priority Type first (0) and overflows to the next (1) when capacity is exhausted.

Add your first Region Type:

• Priority — defaults to 0. Leave it as is, this means it will fill first.

• Name — rename from ‘default’ to something like bare-metal.

• Locations — bare metal and cloud Locations are split into two collapsible groups. Select from the bare metal group. You can check all bare metal Locations at once, or expand and pick specific geographic regions.

You’ll also be able to add Environment Variables. These variables apply to every game server in these Locations and override the defaults of the image. But we won’t need to set any for our purposes.

For this guide, we’ll say that we have a bare metal location in Frankfurt, Germany.

Before moving on, click on ‘+ Add’ in the top right corner so we can configure our cloud Region Type.

Once you’ve hit ‘+ Add’, a second Type box will appear. It is automatically set to 1. We will use this second Type for our cloud location(s). Remember, because it’s at 1, it will fill after our bare metal location.

The configuration is pretty much the same:

• Priority — auto-set to 1. This Type fills after bare metal is at full capacity.

• Name — rename to cloud.

• Locations — select from the cloud group. This covers GameFabric Cloud and BYOC Locations. Once again, we’ll say we have a cloud Location in Frankfurt, Germany for this Region.

Once your Locations are set up and your Region Types are defined and prioritized, go ahead and click ‘create Region’ at the bottom.

And bingo! You now have a Region with bare metal and cloud capacity inside your newly created Environment.

You can verify that your Region was created successfully by remaining on the Regions page. It should be populated with your first entry.

Congratulations! You’ve got your Environment and Region active in GameFabric. Your infrastructure is ready to receive some game servers.

If you want a deeper understanding of how Environments and Regions work together, you can familiarize yourself by exploring our official documentation.

Next: Getting Started with GameFabric: Branches & Images