Running dedicated game servers in Kubernetes Engine: tutorial

Packaging server applications as container images is quickly gaining traction across tech organizations, game companies among them. They want to use containers to improve VM utilization, as well as take advantage of the isolated run-time paradigm. Despite their interest, many game companies don't know where to start.

Using the orchestration framework Kubernetes to deploy production-scale fleets of dedicated game servers in containers is an excellent choice. We recommend Google Kubernetes Engine as the easiest way to start a Kubernetes cluster for game servers on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) without manual setup steps. Kubernetes will help simplify your configuration management and select a VM with adequate resources to spin up a match for your players for you automatically.

We recently put together a tutorial that shows you how to integrate dedicated game servers with Kubernetes Engine, and how to automatically scale the number of VMs up and down according to player demand. It also offers some key storage strategies, including how to manage your game server assets without having to manually distribute them with each container image. Check it out, and let us know what other Google Cloud tools you’d like to learn how to use in your game operations. You can reach me on Twitter at @gcpjoe.