Setting up GameLift fleets

This section provides detailed help with designing, building, and maintaining fleets for use with a GameLift managed hosting solution. GameLift managed fleets are used to deploy custom game servers and Realtime Servers.

A fleet represents your hosting resources in the form of a set of EC2 virtual computing machines, called instances. A fleet's locations determines where, geographically, instances are deployed to host game sessions for your players. The size of a fleet, and the number of game sessions and players it can support, depends on the number of instances you give it, which you can adjust either manually or by auto-scaling.

Many games in production use more than one fleet. You need multiple fleets to, for example, have more than one version of your game server running simultaneously, provide back-up capacity for Spot fleets, or to build in redundancy.

To learn about how to create fleets that best suit your game needs, start with GameLift fleet design guide. Once you get a fleet up and running, you can manage fleet capacity, create a fleet alias, and add the fleet to a game session queue.