EC2 Flexible Instance Type

Hello.

How about increasing the number of EC2 units using AutoScaling according to the number of requests instead of changing the instance type?
Changing the instance type requires stopping EC2, so even if it can be implemented, it is not recommended.

Also, if you are using EC2 as a game server, I think one way is to use GameLift.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/fleets-multiprocess.html

Hello James,

Amazon often needs to relocate the virtual machine to different hardware that has the necessary resources to accommodate the new size. So, to scale an AWS EC2 instance vertically, you must first stop the instance, change its size, and then restart it. Moreover, operating systems and software typically struggle to manage sudden increases in RAM or CPU cores.

To avoid downtime, you might want to take a look at vSphere vMotion with VMWare Cloud on AWS, but it is a challenging task and it might not be as responsive as you want.

Hi,

The use case that you depict seems ideally suited for serverless: Lambda functions which won't cost you anything if they are not used.

So, do you have full control of the source code of your game? If yes, you should re-architect it to Lambdas to achieve the cost efficiency that you are looking for.

I highly recommend https://serverlessland.com/patterns to get the best practises of serverless. Additionally, you can envision an hybrid approach where you use of mix of EC2 instances + Lambdas for the use cases where rapid scaling is required.

Best,

Didier