Edgegap’s mission is to make the distributed cloud simple to use. We run containers close to users by deploying instantaneously in one of 350 locations worldwide. Sometimes, it’s not necessary to deploy instantaneously, so we also built a next-gen fleet manager on top of our instant deployment technology.

In the gaming industry, fleet management has been a standard for more than a decade in terms of managing and scaling game servers. AWS Gamelift was one of the early products to do this, and it shows. Many have followed suit with their own take on fleet management, such as Google’s Agones Open Source project. At Edgegap, we think fleet management is slow, costly, and a pretty inefficient way of dealing with infrastructure. However, we understand that it has its benefits for some specific use cases, such as MMOs and drop-in drop-out types of games that run for a long time.

That’s why we’ve decided to build a fleet manager after much deliberation and internal soul-searching. 

Say whaaat? You might be saying. Say yaaa! We might answer

Of course, we’re not going to build just your standard, run-of-the-mill fleet manager. We’re Edgegap, after all… Our whole ethos is about making the distributed cloud simple to use in a very flexible manner, and fleet managers are bulky, unwieldy, and very much centralized. So how did we go about it? Enter the Distributed Fleet Manager! Instead of deploying big server instances (8CPU and up) in very central locations, you can instead deploy tiny containers (1/8CPU) in many distributed locations. You can deploy your fleets by specifying the continent, country, city, or even specific coordinates where you’d like your server fleet to launch. Don’t worry about where to send your users; we’ll send them to the best place based on latency. Or you can tell them where to go anyways, that’s up to you.

What about scalability? Well, it’s pretty much a given; we’ll follow the curve of incoming traffic closely to make sure you can always serve your user, but also don’t end up with a ton of under-used server capacity, which is can ramp up costs really fast in current fleet management services.

You can do a lot of fun things we can do with this fleet manager. Do you want to host your game services in a more distributed way? Simply use a load balancer on top of it, and you get distributed game services worldwide! You have a metaverse-type of experience where players from everywhere in the world can chat, interact and switch servers at any time (Hiber anyone?); we got it covered.

However, we still think that dealing with infrastructure in a very static, immobile way is not the most efficient way of serving users. This fleet manager might grow some wings in the near future, so stay tuned!

If you’d like to learn more about the Edgegap fleet manager and how we can help, join our Discord or drop us a line at contact@edgegap.com!