Realtime TCP/IP Socket Server on Amazon EC2

Question

Hello everyone,

I am planning to move a game server of mine to Amazon EC2. Right now the actual server runs on .Net Framework 3.5 on a windows dedicated server. Since it is a personal side-project, it's quite expensive to have a fully dedicated server to that, therefore I would like to move it to the cloud (Amazon EC2 or maybe Windows Azure).

Have someone accomplished such thing? Is it possible to do so? If yes, could you provide me with some documentaiton on the subject since I was only been able to find doc for setting up web servers over http. The server binds and listens to 2 TCP sockets (nodelay option) on 2 different ports.

Thanks a lot!

Kel

Answer 1

You should be able to do this on Azure using custom AppFabric ServiceBus binding, with TcpRelayConnectionMode = Hybrid.

There's some background on how this works here.

Answer 2

With EC2 you own full control of the server. That means you'll be able to deploy your app without much modification and have full control to tune the system to your needs. I'm not familiar with game servers, but if you need to tune your environment (ports, accounts, services etc.) then EC2 is probably the platform for you.

If your application is very light then you may be able to get away with using the 'Mini' EC2 instances, which only cost about 3-5 cents/hr. Cost comparisons between EC2 and Azure are a bit challenging, but my understanding is that Azure can get expensive due to their billing methodology. I've written a small cloud comparison article recently that gives an overview of the main players: http://blog.labslice.com/2010/10/choosing-your-cloud.html.

There's not much more to say. The cloud solutions can be quite confusing. Each tend to come with unique terminologies, a vast amount of services and certain peculiarities. In short, you're best off to just test both EC2 and Azure simply to get the ball rolling. Costs are pretty low and there's no lock-in for testing.

Simon @ http://LabSlice.com

Answer 3

I know you already accepted an answer but if you are running your server 24-7 it may just be cheaper to get dedicated hosting. Doing the math it would cost 86.40 to run a small instance (I did small instead of micro because you also have to calculate in EBS pricing for the data, the micro instance has no local storage). Doing a Google search for "Cheep dedicated hosting" gave me this provider for 66.95/mo. ($37.95 for the server + $29 for using windows instead of Linux)

If you are doing testing I would recommend using EC2 to get things working smoothly but when you are ready to deploy and want the game running all the time you can save a lot of money by going with a traditional hosting provider instead of doing cloud computing.