Agones and Fly Kubernetes

containers
1

Hi, I run a small indie game studio and one of the games we are working on uses dedicated server fleets running in Agones, on top of K8s. We’re still in development, so everything is running on local k8s clusters for now, but we are starting to plan out our alpha, beta, and production infras and tooling. Historically, we have used AWS for our online services and game servers, however after some investigations, we’ve found that at least for managed k8s, Fly.ip should be significantly cheaper at our expected scale and resource requirements than AWS EKS.

The problem however is that Agones, which is just a thin layer installed on top of K8s, requires you to use the k8s API in order manage server fleets. From what I’ve gathered from the documentation however, Fly Kubernetes does not allow access to the K8s API, which is sadly a non-starter for us.

With that context now laid out, my actually question is two-fold.

  1. Are there any plans to allow access to the k8s API when using the Fly Kubernetes product?
  2. Has anyone had success strapping kubernetes across their Fly machines manually and exposing the k8s API that way? I assume this should be doable, but wasn’t sure if there were some known constraints that made this infeasible.
2

fly kubernetes definitely lets you access the k8s api! unfortunately, it’s in closed beta at the moment and we’re not accepting new testers (the team’s focus is elsewhere at the moment, we’d not be able to support it properly).
there’s definitely users who set up k3s or such on top of fly machines. I’m not entirely familiar with the setup, but it seems to work well for them.

3

Gotcha, thanks for the info! In our case, k3s wouldn’t be sufficient, so I wonder if there are any limitations that would prevent strapping a full k8s cluster across multiple fly nodes.

4

:sweat_smile: to my understanding k3s is a “full” kubernetes cluster, including Flannel CNI, ingress controllers, cluster DNS, etc.. (docs)
what specifically do you require from kubernetes that k3s doesn’t provide?
(either way k3s is just the distribution I’ve seen used, it’s definitely possible to run others on Fly)

5

K3s isnt designed for our use case. its targeted for edge and iot. Its not a good fit for dedicated game servers. its also unsupported by Agones, or at least not officially supported.

Either way, it sounds like there’s likely no limitations to fly nodes that would prevent strappong k8s across them, so i suppose the next step for me is to stand up a small development environment and give it a try.

Thanks for the help!