Creating a new trend, Google and Ubisoft have announced a new project called Agones to provide an open source alternative to managing and hosting multiplayer game servers. Often, it is seen that the gaming companies write their own systems for running these servers.
Agones in Greek means ‘Contest’. It uses the Google-incubated Kubernetes container project as a core tool for orchestrating and scaling a fleet of multiplayer game servers. When you play your favourite multiplayer game, it’s these kind of game servers that assure that users can see each other as they traverse an island full of 99 other suicidal maniacs. For example, they also often run the software necessary to identify cheaters. Containers are actually ideal for this kind of scenario because game sessions tend to last for relatively short periods of time and containers can be deployed and shut down quickly.
Agones essentially extends Kubernetes with the kind of tools necessary to run a game server. The team shared that developers can easily integrate their custom matchmaking services for pairing gamers with each other with the standard Kubernetes APIs to start up a game server. Agones include a custom Kubernetes Controller and custom resource definitions for the game server.
Though, Agones is cloud agnostic and can run on virtually any cloud or on premises, Google would be happy if developers host their games on the Google Kubernetes Engine. The team further shared that a second version road map is already in the works. The team is also working on new feature like game server Fleets and support for Windows, game server stats and node auto-scaling.
