Managed Game Server Hosting (Clanforge) - Allocation vs reservation features

Advanced scaling

The allocation system offers advanced scaling capabilities and more flexibility. Multiplay can take machines out of an allocation-based fleet for maintenance or troubleshooting without affecting the rest of your fleet or your matchmaker.

The reservation system is best suited for simple game configurations. It cannot operate multiple versions of a game server concurrently. For example, if you have different game image versions for each platform you support (e.g., Xbox, PC, PS4), you would need to create separate fleets for each platform. Whereas, with the allocation system, you could run all three game image versions concurrently in the same fleet.

Game process management

Multiplay offers game process management for both allocation-based fleets and reservation-based fleets.

Game image management

Our advanced game image management platform is available to both allocation-based fleets and reservation-based fleets.

Monitoring

Both the allocation system and the reservation system support advanced monitoring and reporting on metrics such as concurrent players.

Automatic defragmentation

Multiplay’s allocation system automatically defragments your fleet by adjusting your compute capacity based on instance costs. When your game’s CCU decreases, we shutdown the least cost-effective cloud instances first. Conversely, in a reservation-based fleet, there is no automatic defragmentation. Your matchmaker selects instances from a pool of game server instances without considering instance costs. The pool of game server instances expands to fulfill the fleet requirements using a round-robin or scattergun approach for placing players. Multiplay’s reservation system waits for game server instances to idle before shutting them down. The reservation system results in an average of 16-20% increase in costs associated with cloud instances.

Cost-based session placement

The allocation system intelligently adjusts your fleet capacity to fluctuation in concurrent players. It considers the location, cost, and performance of multiple cloud instance providers to ensure that your fleet is always using the most cost-effective option. It scales your fleet into the least expensive cloud instances first and de-scales your fleet by shutting down the most expensive instances first.

Matchmaker integration

With reservation-based fleets, more of the allocation logic falls on the game matchmaker, whereas, with allocation-based fleets, our platform intelligently manages allocations and deallocations.