[imbriaco]

The vast majority of game servers are hosted on public cloud providers. They turn out to be a pretty perfect example of an ideal cloud workload:

- Very elastic demand curve

- Generally ephemeral with any necessary persistent state stored off-host

- Benefit from geographic distribution of cloud regions because they're generally quite latency sensitive

[dijit]

That’s not true in my experience. The cost of running on public cloud is extremely prohibitive.

There are some things that can run on cloud, but the heavy hitting game servers should really be bare metal for the baseline.

I gave a talk about this in Stockholm once, unfortunately it wasn’t recorded but I can share the slides if you want.

[imbriaco]

It's very true in my experience, and we've looked pretty hard at all the options. Thanks for the offer of the slides, I have first hand experience with this at scale.

It certainly depends a lot on how sophisticated your autoscaling is and how closely you're able to follow demand to limit waste, how well you can manage per-host utilization, whether you are CPU or memory bound, and lots of other factors. But even at truly massive scale the cloud hosting option can be very competitive without nearly as much management overhead.

[jayd16]

Not nearly as ephemeral as web traffic though. Games usually last longer than a spot instance could normally support.