agones-dev/agones

Agones is an open-source project for hosting, running, and scaling dedicated game servers on Kubernetes. A dedicated game server is a separate process that runs a multiplayer game session independently of any player's machine. Managing many of these servers, scaling them up and down as players join and leave, and keeping track of which ones are available for new sessions is a coordination problem that typically requires custom-built tools. Agones approaches this by treating game servers as a first-class resource inside Kubernetes, which is the system many companies use to manage and scale software services in the cloud. Rather than building a separate management layer, Agones extends Kubernetes with new resource types specific to games: a GameServer type for an individual server process and a Fleet type for a group of servers that scale together. Once installed, you can define and manage these resources using the same tools and processes you already use for other Kubernetes workloads. Matchmaking systems can connect directly to Agones through the Kubernetes API to request a game server for a new match. Agones handles health checking, tracks connection information for each server so players can actually reach it, and integrates with Kubernetes' built-in cluster autoscaling so that the underlying machines grow or shrink based on demand. There is also metric export support so operations teams can monitor server populations and performance. Game server code integrates with Agones through a client SDK. SDKs are provided for multiple languages and let the game server process signal its state to Agones, for example marking itself as ready to accept players or requesting its own shutdown when a match ends. The project originated at Google and the name comes from a Greek word for contest or competition. It is Apache 2.0 licensed.