GameFabric & Linux Containers: Building Scalable Game Server Infrastructure

When it comes to building modern game server infrastructure, developers are really looking for three key qualities: consistency, portability, and efficiency. The days of painstakingly setting up each individual physical server by “hand” are, fortunately, now behind us. Today, with rapid development cycles and the need for game servers that can spin up anywhere in the world on a dime, deployment methods have become both smooth and automated. A core technology that makes this possible is containerization. 

GameFabric, Nitrado’s developer-first multiplayer server orchestration platform, is fundamentally architected around this streamlined technology. By utilizing Linux containers, GameFabric provides game studios with an efficient and consistent environment for deploying and managing their multiplayer server fleet at any scale.

What Is Linux Containerization?

In essence, containerization is a method of operating system-level virtualization. It packages an application and all its dependencies (libraries, system tools, configuration files), into a single, isolated unit referred to as a container. While the concept is broad, the dominant, industry-standard technology is Linux containers, which run on a shared Linux OS kernel but are logically separated from one another. This makes sure each application operates in its own predictable and self-contained environment.

For game server deployment, this approach solves several long-standing challenges:

Consistency

It eliminates the “it works on my machine” problem. A game server image built within a container will run identically, whether on your local machine, a staging server, or a production bare metal server in a data center on the other side of the globe.

Portability

Containers are designed to be portable across different infrastructure. A containerized game server can be easily moved between bare metal hosts and various cloud providers, a prime enabler of GameFabric’s hybrid cloud strategy.

Efficiency

Because containers share the host operating system’s kernel, their overhead is quite lightweight. This allows for higher server density (more game server instances on a single physical machine) and improves both resource utilization and cost-efficiency.

Rapid Deployment

Their efficiency also means that containers can be started, stopped, and replicated in seconds. This speed is crucial for the dynamic server scaling required to handle fluctuating player loads during a game launch, major content update, or a special event like a sale.

GameFabric has embraced container orchestration wholeheartedly in its mission to provide the most developer-first platform possible. Studios provide GameFabric with their game server image, and from there the platform’s container orchestration layer, built upon industry standards like Kubernetes (K8s) and Agones, automates the entire lifecycle of these containers.

When a new game session is needed, GameFabric rapidly instantiates a new container from the provided image on an appropriate provisioned server within a global fleet. This process is capable of happening hundreds of times per second (upwards of 250), and is what enables the massive, on-demand scaling necessary for major multiplayer games.

Another core philosophy embodied by GameFabric is the concept of cloud-native architecture and the operational flexibility that affords. Namely, through the option to deploy Sidecars: secondary containers that run alongside a primary game server container. This allows for added functionality like log collection and performance metrics, dramatically simplifying updates and maintenance. 

Because each container is in an isolated environment, GameFabric can run different game servers, or different versions of the same game server (e.g., staged rollouts using its Branches feature), on the same underlying hardware without conflict.

The chief benefit of GameFabric’s container-based architecture is a significant reduction in operational complexity for studios. Developers can simply focus on building their games and then package them into a standard game server image using familiar tools like Docker, maintaining confidence that the GameFabric platform will handle the intricate details of deployment, scaling, health checking, and management across a global, hybrid infrastructure of bare metal and cloud resources.

Reach out today for your personalized demo and experience the highly scalable, developer-first infrastructure of GameFabric firsthand.