[andrew89898]

Hi - I play CSGO quite regularly usually MM/FACEIT, in the past interested in game server emulation, servers etc so I've been always interested in running CSGO / source game servers for people as a service. I have also been thinking of doing it just as a side project to make a web app similar to faceit where you can matchmake into a 5v5, create your own servers or join community servers.

I had been planning to use APIs to do this type of thing, but as I am a dev/SRE in my day-to-day role have been looking into Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS GameLift/fleetIQ, Agones etc for this type of thing. I even set up a AWS GameLift EKS cluster but the cost was extraordinate, I planned to have something scalable so even if no one used the service, costs would be minimal.

Apologies if this is the wrong area - but does anyone have any experience for wannabe server devs / network owners?

Thanks.

[TomL.]

It's doable and not that complicated.
What region do you want to deploy the service?

[andrew89898]

Originally Posted by TomL. It's doable and not that complicated. What region do you want to deploy the service?

I’m from the UK, so region would probably be EU.

[Maxximou5]

There are a plethora of avenues you can take, but I can say the one I decided on was using AWS. One because cost can easily be minimized if you take care of the expenses by building your own stuff instead of constantly creating and destroying. You'll pay a hefty fee keeping servers online all the time and downloading the server files every time you start a new EC2 or the like. Doubt you would need something like GameLift, but to each their own.

Creating a baked AMI, using playbooks, S3 bucket, role templates, deployment scripts. Once you've done those or the ones you only need, payment is pretty low and deployment is easy and scalability is high. I can deploy a new server in seconds and be joinable, costs penny to run it for a match and shut it down. How you pay for this service is up to you, but if you charge a small fee to the user, there is of course no cost.

[andrew89898]

Originally Posted by Maxximou5 There are a plethora of avenues you can take, but I can say the one I decided on was using AWS. One because cost can easily be minimized if you take care of the expenses by building your own stuff instead of constantly creating and destroying. You'll pay a hefty fee keeping servers online all the time and downloading the server files every time you start a new EC2 or the like. Doubt you would need something like GameLift, but to each their own. Creating a baked AMI, using playbooks, S3 bucket, role templates, deployment scripts. Once you've done those or the ones you only need, payment is pretty low and deployment is easy and scalability is high. I can deploy a new server in seconds and be joinable, costs penny to run it for a match and shut it down. How you pay for this service is up to you, but if you charge a small fee to the user, there is of course no cost.

Yeah AWS sounds good, I was messing around with a csgo container from cm2network - it downloads the game files everytime - was thinking of putting the game files on block storage and copying them in or something. Scripts to spin up a server quickly using ansible sounds good, will look into that.