Why are GameLift EC2 instances more expensive than regular EC2 instances?
For example, a GameLift EC2 on-demand instance m5.large costs 0,146 USD per hour in eu-central-1. The same instance on EC2 costs 0,115 USD per hour in eu-central-1
So the GameLift service on top of EC2 makes the instance 27% more expensive. Is there anything included in the GameLift pricing that I would have to pay separately if I would build everything manually with EC2? Or is the GameLift API that saves me some programming the only reason for the increase of the instance price?
I would like to evaluate if I can save a considerable amount of money by building a master server myself that is responsible for everything that GameLift can do for me, or if I would basically end up with the same running costs because I am missing the insight that I would be charged extra for some service when using EC2 manually that are already included in the GameLift calculation.
Thanks in advance
Thanks, the answer is somewhat incomplete since I can only assume now that building the thing myself will save me 27% of running cost, because the list of features you linked sounds like it does not include other AWS services that would be added on top when building it manually. Honestly it's a bit hard to get to the facts through all the marketing speech in the linked doc. But I know it's the best answer I will get so I marked it as accepted.