Setting up GameLift queues for game session placement

Take advantage of GameLift FleetIQ to find the "best possible" placement. When processing game session placement requests, a queue uses FleetIQ algorithms to prioritize queue locations based on a set of defined preferences. You can configure a queue to prioritize placement based on some combination of lowest player latency, lowest hosting cost, fleet characteristics, and locations.

Host games on lower-priced Spot fleets. Use queues to optimize use of AWS Spot fleets, which offer significantly lower hosting costs. By default, FleetIQ always tries to place new game sessions in Spot fleets.

Place new games faster during high demand. Queues are configured with multiple possible locations for placements. This means that there is always fallback capacity if the preferred placement location is unavailable. In contrast, when placing game sessions on a single fleet location, it is possible for the location to fill up. Even with auto-scaling, it takes time to spin up new instances when needed. As a result, with queues, player wait time is less likely to be impacted during surges in player demand.

Make game availability more resilient. Outages can happen. With a multi-Region queue, a slowdown or outage doesn't have to affect player access to your game. Instead, if one or more preferred locations are unavailable, GameLift can place new game sessions with the next best choice. Auto-scaling can adjust to this temporary shift in fleet activity until the preferred fleet(s) are available again.

Use extra fleet capacity more efficiently. To handle unexpected surges in player demand, it makes sense to have quick access to extra hosting capacity. When placing game sessions on a single fleet location, you need to maintain a higher level of idle capacity just in case. In contrast, the fleet locations in a queue provide back-up capacity for each other. Locations scale up or down based on player demand. For example, when demand is high in Asia, demand is typically low in Europe; your European fleets can provide fallback capacity to support surges in Asia, even when they're scaled down during low demand.

Get metrics on game session placements and queue performance. GameLift emits queue-specific metrics, including statistics on placement successes and failures, the number of requests in the queue, and average time that requests spend in the queue. You can view these metrics in the GameLift console or in CloudWatch.