Google Cloud Game Servers with Mark Mandel

Former GCP Podcast host Mark Mandel is our guest this week. He’s talking Google Cloud Game Servers, Agones, and more with Mark Mirchandani and guest host Stephanie Wong.

Mark explains how dedicated game servers work and why gaming has embraced the idea of dedicated servers. Online multiplayer gaming with its need for fast, consistent state sharing among players benefits from dedicated servers and offers cheating mitigation and reduced latency, as well as development flexibility. He tells us a little about the history of the open source project, Agones, and how it has helped Kubernetes run memory-state games efficiently on these dedicated servers.

Google Cloud Game Servers work with layers of products to create a seamless multiplayer environment. Mark details this process and how Kubernetes, GKE, and Agones work together with these servers to accomplish this goal at scale. This situation is ideal for developers looking for the customizability and flexibility of a self-controlled system rather than a fully managed lift and shift model. Mark talks about the features of GCGS, including the versioning configuration system that allows you to create multiple configurations, and roll outs that give you control over distribution.

We also learn a little about game building best practices and how Mark and his team advise and educate other game developers.

Mark Mandel

Mark Mandel is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform. Hailing from Australia, Mark built his career developing backend web applications which included several widely adopted open source projects, and running an international conference in Melbourne for several years. Since then he has focused on becoming a polyglot developer, building systems in Go, JRuby and Clojure on a variety of infrastructures. In his spare time he plays with his dog, trains martial arts, and reads too much fantasy literature.

Cool things of the week

• Google Cloud Docs Samples docs
• Limiting public IPs on Google Cloud blog

Interview

• Google Cloud Game Servers site
• Agones site
• Agones Prerequisite Knowledge docs
• Kubernetes site
• GKE site
• Online Game Technology, Drawn Badly videos
• GCP Podcast Episode 142: Agones with Mark Mandel and Cyril Tovena podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 202: Supersolid with Kami May podcast
• Multiplay site
• Accelbyte site
• Improbable site
• Find the right Google Cloud partner site
• Game Developers Conference site
• Agones on Slack site
• Agones on Twitter site
• Mark Mandel on Twitch site
• Mark Mandel on YouTube site

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Stephanie is working on Season of Scale season 5 and a data center animated series that will launch in a few weeks!

Sound Effects Attribution

• “TrumpetBrassFanfare.wav” by ohforheavensake of Freesound.org
• “8-bit Video Game Sounds.wav” by ProjectsU012 of Freesound.org
• “music elevator.wav” by Jay_You of Freesound.org