Cost Model for Scalable Containerized Relay Game Servers

Abstract

Previous research has looked into how to dynamically scale containerized applications with consideration to clients Quality of Experience (QoE), but there is a lack of knowledge on how relay server’s, used for multiplayer games, scale. Through investigating the largest cloud platform providers, three key metrics were identified: Network traffic, memory allocation and CPU utilization. These metrics were investigated depending on several parameters: the clients perceived frequency of messages, the number of clients connected to a server, and the number of clients playing the same game. To do this, a client-simulator program was expanded to work with a pre-existing server developed by Opera Software. The server and client-simulators were used in different environments, both bare-metal machines and containers from Amazon Web Services. Upon analyzation it was found that network traffic and memory allocation scales linearly, while the CPU utilization can only be interpolated withing a range used to train a third degree regression model. The error of all models were fairly low at a maximum of 2,658%.