Authoritative Server Cloud Hosting Revisited: Anything new under the sun?

Hi there,

Two years ago, a great thread on this forum, led by Metldown, npsf3000, koen.pis and hjupter among others, about cloud game hosting options, concluded, if I understood well, that:

1) There was no PaaS offer out there delivering the ping necessary to elastically (in the sense of real-time server sharding and relocation automatically managed by the provider to guarantee SLA) host authoritative servers running Unity for physics/collision calculation while providing reliably low enough latency to clients worldwide;

2) Amazon EC2 was an especially inappropriate choice for such a hosting need due to high lag variation/jitter;

3) only IaaS dedicated server hosting solutions with the highest-end bandwidth options were able to be stably fast enough for reliably fluid gameplay;

4) those solution were limited to either the US or Europe but not both, and nobody even started to talk about servers deployed in Asia, Oceania and South America for gamers on those continents.

In essence, it was not possible for a game studio to delegate to a single cloud provider the task of running enough instances of a game server geographically close enough to the gamer clients and using reliably fast enough connections on telecom carriers to guarantee latency low enough as to not disturb game play (as is I believe fairly common practice for web sites today even those with video streaming).

Now two years later, with Amazon, Azure and many others continuing to roll out new services at a fast pace, could anyone tell us whether the situation remains as bleak, or whether some of these new and improved offers are available to free a game studio to have to handle itself global server farm administration and optimization from a motley crew of continental-only IaaS offers?
Thanks a lot!

 

Low latency cluster hosting is not something anyone I know have specialized in. People who can afford building games which actually require a cluster of servers to service all players can afford paying for their own hardware.

 

Thanks for your answer, a nice single ping in the ocean deafening silence that my question triggered :sad:
I am not sure I understand it however.
Are you implying that only large studios develop real-time action games with an audience potentially scattered all over the world?
Even if that's the case, if current state-of-the-art PaaS makes multiplayer real-time game deployment at all viable, why NOT using it? I mean, even if you are loaded with money, every dollar spent on purchasing and administrating a global game server cluster, is one less dollar available to develop attractive game assets/improvements and e-market them. That's the whole point of cloud computing: focus your expenses on your core business while taking advantage of the economy of scale provided by internet giants for the dull infrastructure chores.

I am rather confused by reading:
- on the one hand, the many posts on this forum (and the UnityPark one) saying in essence "AWS latency time / lag irregularity prevents multiplayer real-time game deployment", "only dedicated servers geographically close to the gamers can be reliably fast enough"
- on the other hand, the UberStrike success story on Amazon's web site.

Is the latter just deceitful marketing?

Thanks in advance for enlightening me anyone (message in a bottle 2: never give up hope!)

 

I'm not aware of any major changes in the market, other than Photon Cloud of course. That said, I've not being paying super attention to it either.

 

The only thing I heard about recently is the Xbox One games (Titanfall and Forza I think) using Windows Azure for their hosting, but I doubt it's the same infrastructure that is available to the public.

More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn532200.aspx

 

Hey guys,

We are a new provider of fast and reliable authoritative hosted server solution: Game Cloud Continental

The service is currently in Alpha stage, but a demo of it is already available, you can register and check it here.

 

Interesting.

 

I've done quite a bit of research on this I'll share what I know.

The lowest cost low latency solutions right now use Infiniband. Microsecond latencies between servers is a real thing with this. You can get the adapters for around $50 on ebay, but the switches are hard to come by used and they are not cheap.

Almost all the providers that offer this service cater to high end clients. https://www.profitbricks.com/ seems to be one exception, still waiting to hear back from them on some questions I had.

Cloud providers in general are bad for games. Unreliable vm performance is a real issue, and forget low latencies between servers in the cloud.

Prices have come down a lot over the last few years. The switches are still insanely priced but not so much that a provider cannot afford it, as they are long term buys. The cost of adapters is not really an issue anymore, not when you are running 24-48 core servers.

I think the biggest obstacle to low latency hosting is that companies going into the hosting market usually need funding, and to get funding you need to show the largest possible market that you can. This is still a niche market. I think it would be a profitable one, but still niche.

 

Sorry for digging up old thread corpses but this thread caught my eye

On topic: I am not 100% sure Photon is a great solution as it's not authoritative. But that's just me being picky
Not sure about any hosters, but I did find a nice site (I didn't sign up yet, just browsing) called i3d.net, however if you look-up reviews you'll see mixed opinions. The company itself that posted on a lot of sites claims the "negative" experiences were due to faulty hardware from before which is no longer used in production. As for what happened with the disgruntled clients - it's slightly vague.

Some of their posts claim they made offers to migrate to the new hardware (tho not sure if it was free of charge...). Other negative issues would be the fact SOME claim it's hard to cancel a contract (claiming they opt-ed out of their servers but they kept being charged or had the "hounds" sent after them to claim the debt), however, the replies to those statements are that the only problem was from those that had actual debt and tried to cancel AFTER the contract expired or "forgot" to pay the subscription.

Of course there are positive reviews on their hardware and tech support as well. As I said, mixed reviews but their pricing + hardware seems decent. Since my project isn't done yet, there is no point for me to call them yet, but out of most of the recommended gamehoster sites I found they seemed "acceptable". Note I msotly skimmed through them so I can't guarantee anything

Slightly off-topic:

The website is a bit unsettling. There are a large number of headlines promoting "mobile this" and "mobile that" all over the site. Does that mean that if I were to make the next SC2\Quake\NFS game (that obviously need a desktop) I can't reliably count on your services ?
Then there is a random sentence on the site saying

... which kinda contradicts the whole "mobile" advertising.

Also your post says "reliable authoritative hosted server solution", however the website says

I ask because the information seems to clash and offer ambiguous offers that more or less cancel each other (or at least they do in my eyes).

Is your service a managed hosting service, colocation or a cloud that just passes information semi-authoritatively like Photon? There is a huge difference between these three and in a game where "health", "ammo", "armor", "energy" and so on need to be server-side to prevent exploits, "no server needed" (which most of the time translates to dumb-servers, semi-authoritative servers and so on where each client acts as a simulated server) does NOT offer protection against cheats (even on Unity web games - as some of you know CSP has a LOT of hacks going on and it's a web game, not standalone - and yes, it uses Photon).

I for one am looking for a managed hosting service; I provide the software (i.e. binaries, kit\setup, etc.) and they'd provide the servers which run game instances (translation: fully authoritative).

I am just trying to understand what your service does because reading every headline (and your post) it's not quite clear to me. Sorry, I am not trying to trashtalk your server solution, of course, as it does look nice, but I am trying to make heads and tails of it and it doesn't seem clear enough to me. Maybe I am just tired or small-minded
Perhaps more detailed information would be appreciated by everyone, not just with a "hey, here is my new service, try it!"
The problem is I signed up for RoarEngine because of what it seemed to do (potential-wise and yes it's great, jsut not what I needed) and I realized that it's mostly tailored for RPG and MMO games rather than "real-time" games so I just wanna be sure this time from the start

 

Hi thedarknomad.

I will try to answer as short and clear as possible.
Our service is exactly what the name of this thread says: "Authoritative Server Cloud Hosting".
it is a managed game hosting, designed as strictly *authoritative* - which means authoritative game server instances are running in our cloud and game clients connect and communicate with them directly. In this model cheating attempts can be made impossible (with appropriate game design of course).
Of course you can have any type of clients - desktop, consoles, mobile, etc. Communication channel with clients is designed to be fast and with minimized traffic size, which provides a great advantage for clients connecting over mobile networks, in this context the word "mobile" is used on our site.
Hope that answers your post. In case you have any additional questions please do not hesitate to contact me, or our team, either here, in our forum, or using contact form at our site.

 

From the research I've done, I'm going with uLink (with its ability to host physics and authoritative servers) and Amazon AWS, which is extremely powerful in setting up new instances on the fly on demand.

Amazon has a global presence, they have more presence than Azure, and they've been around for longer, and their API's are more powerful, and I can't remember them having any major issues (Azure went down for a few days recently).

I'll most likely be using PlayFab for the backend services and data, they offer managed Amazon AWS hosting too, although they have Photon integration, I imagine it would be trivial to get any uLink specific technology integrated with their managed servers.

 

@amarinov
Thanks ! The description's context makes more sense now

@Meltdown
From what I read you get PF for free if you sign up with Photon, since they are partners, although it's not authoritative.
If you don't mind me asking, what will you use PlayFab for ? Steam integration ? (I am relatively new to this so I was wondering what you meant by "backend services and data")

 

You don't get PlayFab 'for free' when you sign up with Photon, they charge per user, with anything under 1000 users is free.
I'm sure what the specifics are related to their Photon partnership, but they charge per user.

Take a look at Playfabs website, they go over all the features, and I will be using most of them.

Perhaps @Brendan Vanous can comment more about the Photon/PlayFab partnership.

 

What we've done is to work with Exit Games to make their Photon Cloud available to PlayFab developers. The short version is that it was a perfect match - all the game services we've developed, and all the multiplayer tech they've developed. That way, you just sign up for PlayFab with multiplayer services (Premium), and you have access to everything. We're going to make this even easier as we progress with our integration, as well. You can expect to see integrated auth, as well as the ability to call into our hosted JavaScript using the webhooks in Photon Realtime, for example.