| This is my field, so even though I’m literally titled “expert”[0]- take what I say with a pinch of salt. When it comes to gameserver performance what tends to be the biggest issue is predictable performance. So, kubernetes is not inherently antithetical to running game servers as long as you don’t share the cpu core(s) with anything. In fact there is a project that (while I was not a part of) was spearheaded by ubisoft in collaboration with Google for running game servers on Kubernetes (called Agones)[1]. Ubisoft also used “Thunderhead” (which this project seems to be a variant of) on Azure with rainbow 6 siege. So it’s definitely not considered a show-stopping problem. When it comes to containers/VMs the biggest hit in terms of performance is in this order: disk/network/memory access/CPU ;; when talking about game servers the most important things go in the reverse of that order, which means that the biggest performance losses are not as important. Network latency might seem like a big deal but you’re limited to frame times in the best case and geographical differentiations will eat much more than the combined weight of frames and Kubernetes networking. Agones itself bypasses a lot of the Kubernetes networking latency additions, though, not all. [0]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharasym [1]: https://agones.dev/site/ |
It’s quite old now but interesting for anyone whose experience is purely running on their own hardware.