Guide to Amazon GameLift Servers Launch Phases for a Successful Game Launch, Part 2

Ahead of an Amazon GameLift Servers launch, teams should organize limits, fleets, testing, monitoring, and deployment strategy starting 2-3 months in advance. Since default service limits are set for the development stage, open beta and early access should also be treated as launches, so submit the launch questionnaire first to request the necessary instance limits and API limits.

The key preparation items are as follows.

• Launch questionnaire: Request instance limits for the home region and each location together with production, test, and load test accounts, and review the APIs you actually use to avoid Describe API calls.
• Production fleets and multiple locations: Keep the game session protection policy set to Full Protection, and start target-based auto scaling with 30-50% headroom in the early launch period. Also prepare multi-location fleets and backup instance types tailored to regional latency and player distribution.
• Load testing: Conduct both direct API call tests such as StartGameSessionPlacement and critical path tests covering login, matchmaking, and session placement.
• API monitoring: Use metric filters on AWS CloudTrail and CloudWatch logs to track ThrottlingException, RequestLimitExceeded, and RateExceeded, and set up Amazon SNS alarms to immediately notify the operations team.
• Deployment: Use Blue/Green deployment to create a separate production fleet for the new build, and switch the queue or Alias to the new fleet to perform an inflight update.

To reduce throttling, apply exponential backoff, pagination, caching, and batch calls. Rather than a load test that ramps from 0 to 500,000 in 5 minutes, a gradual increase similar to the actual launch reveals bottlenecks more accurately. Reference previous game data or tools like SteamDB to establish realistic patterns, and running Amazon ECS tasks on AWS Fargate or scripts that closely resemble real clients across multiple regions allows you to validate latency and the backend together.

In Blue/Green deployment, only new sessions are routed to the new version, while existing sessions are left to finish without interruption. If problems occur, you can roll back quickly by reverting to the previous fleet.