Google launches game server hosting platform Agones
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Google on Tuesday took the wraps off of Agones, an open-source game hosting platform built on top of Kubernetes and developed in partnership with gaming giant Ubisoft.
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According to a Google Cloud Platform blog post, Agones will give game developers an easier way to host the kind of massive, multiplayer games that have grown extremely popular in the gaming world.
The key to Agones is its use of Kubernetes, the Google-incubated project that's emerged as the open-source container orchestration standard.
Read also: AWS launches elastic container service for Kubernetes
Currently, multiplayer game developers go about game server scaling using proprietary software, as most orchestration and scaling systems can't handle such heavy workloads.
Google said Agones is able to replace traditional cluster management and game server scaling systems with Kubernetes clusters, giving way to improved server provisioning via the Kubernetes API and simplified operations for development teams.
"Building Agones on top of Kubernetes has lots of other advantages too: it allows you to run your game workloads wherever it makes the most sense, for example, on game developers' machines via platforms like minikube, in-studio clusters for group development, on-premises machines and on hybrid-cloud or full-cloud environments, including Google Kubernetes Engine," Google developer advocate Mark Mandel wrote in the blog post.
"Our goal is to continually find new ways to provide the highest-quality, most seamless services to our players so that they can focus on their games," added Ubisoft development director Carl Dionne. "Agones helps by providing us with the flexibility to run dedicated game servers in optimal datacenters, and by giving our teams more control over the resources they need. This collaboration makes it possible to combine Google's expertise in deploying Kubernetes at scale with our deep knowledge of game development pipelines and technologies"
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