Migration

/

Agones

Migrate from Agones with zero impact on your players

Migrate from Agones with zero impact on your players

Keep the architecture you built, skip managing the game server orchestration to get back to focusing on game development.

Deploy worldwide with a simple API call, get an address and port back, and your container binary never changes. What goes is the platform underneath it: the clusters, the node pools, the controller and allocator, the fleet autoscalers, the image distribution path and the upgrade cycle that follows three Kubernetes releases forever.

Edgegap’s hybrid orchestration combines bare metal Private Fleets, capacity you still fully control, with our Edge Cloud network of 615+ on-demand locations to keep your hosting cost-effective. Each Edge Cloud deployment goes to the best available location at request time, measured from the player.

No credit card required. Free tier includes the resources to deploy a real game server.

No credit card required. Free tier includes the resources to deploy a real game server.

What changes (and doesn't change)

Changes to expect, at a glance

An Agones migration is a hosting change, not a rewrite, and the architecture you built stays recognisable. Here's what to expect from your migration.

A full feature-by-feature breakdown is in Step 3: Identify & Replace features below.

What Remains the Same

Your netcode and transport

Edgegap never touches your transport, serialization or tick loop. The container runs the same server binary you build today.

Containerize

You already ship a container image, so the artifact is unchanged. Push the same image to our registry, or keep the one you use today.

Your client connect flow

Your client still receives an address and a port and connects to it. Only where that address comes from changes.

Your allocation model

The shape of the thing you built stays: your backend asks for a server and gets connection details back. You are replacing one request with another, not redesigning how sessions are handed out.

What Changes

The Agones SDK comes out

Ready(), Health(), Allocate(), Reserve() and Shutdown() leave your binary, and the SDK sidecar leaves the pod spec with them. Edgegap needs no server SDK. Your server reads its public IP and port mapping from environment variables at deployment and is ready as soon as it listens.

One deploy call replaces GameServerAllocation

Instead of creating a GameServerAllocation and reading state, address and port off the result, your backend posts once to the deploy endpoint, then receives the FQDN and port through a deployment webhook or by polling the deployment status. No label selectors, no allocator topology.

The cluster stops being yours to run

No controller and allocator to operate, no node pools to provision and bin-pack, no image distribution path to build, no fleet dashboards to watch at 3am, and no decision about which regions to stand a cluster up in and pay for. One call reaches every location, and you pay for the deployment rather than the cluster sitting behind it. The pager for the thing that starts your matches moves to us.

The upgrade treadmill ends

Agones supports three Kubernetes releases at a time, so cluster and orchestrator upgrades arrive on someone else's cadence, in every region, forever. That schedule is no longer your problem, and neither is testing it.

Expected Timeline

Five simple steps

Most studios reach end-to-end validation in under two weeks, including parallel running while traffic rolls out.

Most studios reach end-to-end validation in under two weeks, including parallel running while traffic rolls out.

Total: under 1 week

Total: under 1 week

Step 1

Remove the SDK

Remove the SDK

Remove the Agones SDK calls and the sidecar from your pod spec. Nothing proprietary replaces them.

~2 hours

Step 2

Containerize

Containerize

Your server already runs as a container, so this step is a check rather than work.

Already done

Step 3

Push to a Registry

Push to a Registry

Edgegap's registry is available for free, or keep the registry you already run.

~30 min.

Step 4

Swap the Allocation Call

Swap the Allocation Call

One deploy request, plus a webhook or status check for the address, replaces the GameServerAllocation your backend creates today.

~1 day

Step 5

Deploy Globally

Deploy Globally

Deploy globally on Edge Cloud, and optionally cut cost further with egress-free hosting on Private Fleets.

Instant Rollout

Detailed migration steps

The migration steps, in detail, with the code

If you are running Agones on your own clusters and want the same orchestration without operating it, the following simple steps will get you running in no time. Our engineers are available if you want to walk through your setup first.

Before getting started, it helps to be clear on what integrates with what. Edgegap is an API: your backend posts a deploy request and receives the address and port once the deployment is ready, by webhook or by polling its status, and nothing is added to your game server binary. There is no server SDK and no sidecar. We expect that: you currently run Agones on your own Kubernetes clusters, you have a working game server container, and you can change the allocation call in your backend.

Step 1:

Remove the Agones SDK

Edgegap does not require a server SDK to integrate. The first step is to remove the Agones SDK from your game server: the connection to the SDK server, the Ready() call after start-up, the Health() ping loop, and the Allocate(), Reserve() and Shutdown() calls that move the GameServer through its states. Anything reading back through GameServer() or WatchGameServer(), and any SetLabel() or SetAnnotation() calls used to carry match metadata, comes out too. The SDK sidecar leaves the pod spec with them, along with AGONES_SDK_GRPC_PORT and AGONES_SDK_HTTP_PORT. On Edgegap your server reads what it needs from environment variables injected at deployment, including its public IP and port mapping, and it is ready for players as soon as it is listening. Match metadata that used to travel as labels travels as environment variables on the deploy request.

Step 2:

Containerize your game server

Your game server already runs as a container, so this step is a check rather than a rebuild. Confirm the image builds and starts without the SDK sidecar, then push it to Edgegap's free registry or keep the registry you run today. If you built an image distribution path to speed up pulls, and many teams running Agones at scale have, none of it comes with you: image pull and placement are ours to solve.

Step 3:

Identify & Replace features

Agones - Features

Edgegap - Features

Agones SDK and sidecar

No server SDK. Ports and variables injected at deployment.

GameServerAllocation

One POST to the deploy endpoint. FQDN and port arrive through a deployment webhook or by polling deployment status.

Fleet and GameServerSet

Apps and Versions for the image, Private Fleets for persistent capacity.

replicas and buffer sizing

Nothing to size on Edge Cloud (on-demand). Private Fleets rightsized monthly.

FleetAutoscaler

Automatic. Overflow onto Edge Cloud when a Private Fleet is full.

RollingUpdate, maxSurge and maxUnavailable

Version rollout on Apps and Versions, with rolling updates automatically handled for you.

Packed or Distributed scheduling

Placement at request time, measured from the player.

Multi-cluster allocation

One endpoint. No allocator topology to maintain.

Node provisioning, bin-packing and cluster autoscaling

Handled by Edgegap. No nodes to provision, size or bin-pack, and capacity scales per deployment without a cluster autoscaler to tune.

Image registry and distribution path

Edgegap's registry, or keep your own.

Kubernetes and Agones version upgrades

Fully-managed platform on your behalf

Monitoring, logging and alerting for the platform, security

Deployment Status API, Deployment Webhook, Deployment Analytics and Monitoring, 24/7 support, DDoS protection.

Porting work

Optional: connect your coding agent to the Edgegap MCP server. It loads Edgegap’s tested agent skills and uses your existing image to create the App and Version and deploy your server, and every change can be previewed as a dry run first. There is no Agones-specific skill yet: the Deploy API skill writes the allocation call, and the launch skill covers capacity planning with Private Fleets.

Step 4:

(Optional) Setting up Private Fleets

Private Fleets are the closest thing to the Fleet you run today: persistent, dedicated capacity with egress-free hosting. The difference is everything around it. There are no replicas to tune, no autoscaler policy to write, no nodes to provision or bin-pack, and no cluster to upgrade. You rightsize the Private Fleet monthly, and anything past it bursts onto Edge Cloud automatically.

Pricing

Price Comparison

Discover how Edgegap's orchestration compares to the cost of running your own.

Cost driver 1: the platform work you own.

Agones handles GameServer pods, Fleets and the FleetAutoscaler. Everything else a platform needs, a self-hosting team supplies. This table is the task list, not a price list: your engineering cost is yours to model.

Platform job

Self-hosted Agones

Edgegap

Node provisioning, sizing and bin-packing

Yours

Handled by Edgegap. No nodes to provision, size or bin-pack

Image registry and distribution path

Yours to build and operate

Ours, or keep your registry

Capacity buffering and autoscaler policy

Yours to tune, per fleet, per cluster

Multiple strategies to leverage on Edge Cloud, automated on Private Fleets

Kubernetes and Agones upgrades

Yours, on a three-release support window, in every region

Fully-managed platform on your behalf

Platform monitoring, alerting and the pager

Yours

In-depth analytics and monitoring tool, with 24/7 support included

Multi-cluster allocation topology

Yours

One endpoint

What this table does not cover: the cost of operations. We ran Deconstructor of Fun’s third-party total-cost-of-ownership calculator against a modest Agones adoption, and it lands at roughly $42K to integrate and $567K over three years to develop and maintain, with maintenance benchmarked at 15 to 25 percent of build cost annually. The largest single line is opportunity cost from that model. Read the full breakdown and its caveats.

Cost driver 2: fill rate and idle capacity.

The recurring job of an orchestrator is not deployment, it is fill rate. On self-hosted Agones, you pay for every node for as long as it runs, not for the players on it.


Self-hosted Agones

Edgegap

Scaling up

In whole nodes. Crossing a threshold pays for a full machine to carry the overflow

Per deployment, fractionable from 0.25 vCPU

Scaling down

Waits for stateful sessions to drain before a node can go

Ends with the match

Warm buffer

Sized to cover provisioning time, and idle by design

Not required on Edge Cloud. Deployments are provisioned from scratch in 2 seconds, median, to container ready

Provisioning time

Set by node provisioning and image pull, which is why teams running at scale extend Agones with their own node provisioning and image distribution before the numbers get good

2 seconds, median, from cold start, with nothing to extend

Billing

Per node, for as long as the node runs, whether its game servers are full or empty

Per deployment, by the minute on Edge Cloud, and billing stops when the match ends. Private Fleets bill by the hour

Cost driver 3: compute and coverage.


Self-hosted Agones

Edgegap

Compute

Your cloud or bare metal contracts, at your negotiated rates

$0.00115 per vCPU per minute on Edge Cloud, single price worldwide, or $0.0261 per vCPU per hour on Private Fleets

Coverage

The regions you stood clusters up in

615+ Edge Cloud locations on-demand, with each deployment at the best available location at request time, measured from the player

Egress

Per your provider agreements

Included on Private Fleets

Net effect at thousands of CCU

Cost is compute plus the platform team

25 to 35 percent below pure cloud with a properly optimized hybrid split. Model it in the pricing calculator

Pricing

Optimize costs and performance with hybrid orchestration

Optimize costs and performance with hybrid orchestration

Optimize costs and performance with hybrid orchestration

Edge Cloud

On-Demand

$0.00115

/ vCPU

/ MINUTE

Billed by the Minute, Only on Usage

Pay only when players play. 0 active servers = $0

Deploy game servers worldwide, per instance, to all 615+ edge cloud locations. Zero commitment.

Simply add a credit card.

Edge Cloud

On-Demand

$0.00115

/ vCPU

/ MINUTE

Billed by the Minute, Only on Usage

Pay only when players play. 0 active servers = $0

Deploy game servers worldwide, per instance, to all 615+ edge cloud locations. Zero commitment.

Simply add a credit card.

Private Fleet (Bare Metal)

Reserved Capacity

$0.0261

/ vCPU

/ HOUR

Billed Monthly, Always On

$280 per host/month (12 mo rate), or $350 monthly

Optimize the cost effectiveness of your game server with egress-free hosting of Private Fleets.

Persistent, available 24/7, exclusive to your studio.

Private Fleet (Bare Metal)

Reserved Capacity

$0.0261

/ vCPU

/ HOUR

Billed Monthly, Always On

$280 per host/month (12 mo rate), or $350 monthly

Optimize the cost effectiveness of your game server with egress-free hosting of Private Fleets.

Persistent, available 24/7, exclusive to your studio.

Your bill varies per rate and usage; which can vary per game type, player count, & more.

Your bill varies per rate and usage; which can vary per game type, player count, & more.

Model your usage with our estimate calculator ->

Model your usage with our estimate calculator ->

Edgegap's features & price: detailed comparison between Edge Cloud & Private Fleets

Edgegap's features & price: detailed comparison between Edge Cloud & Private Fleets

COMPARE

Free Trial

Edge Cloud

Private Fleets

FEATURES

Analytics & Monitoring

Billing Alarms

Click to Expand

28 more rows

Unlocks

Capabilities are unlocked when a credit card is added to the account.

COMPARE

Free Trial

Edge Cloud

Private Fleets

FEATURES

Analytics & Monitoring

Billing Alarms

Click to Expand

28 more rows

Unlocks

Capabilities are unlocked when a credit card is added to the account.

COMPARE

Free Trial

Edge Cloud

Private Fleets

FEATURES

Analytics & Monitoring

Billing Alarms

Click to Expand

28 more rows

Unlocks

Capabilities are unlocked when a credit card is added to the account.

Features Comparison

Features Comparison

Edgegap

Google Cloud

Orchestration

Hybrid orchestration, no game server SDK required:

No managed game server service: Google's Game Servers URL now serves the Cloud for Game Development page, and its client library notes "The Cloud Gaming API is officially deprecated."; Google points studios to "Run and scale dedicated game servers on GKE" with open-source Agones, installed and operated by the studio

Infrastructure

Single provider: 43 Google Cloud regions and 130 zones (locations page, updated October 28, 2026); studios create a regional or zonal GKE cluster in each location they serve

Hardware

GKE nodes are "Compute Engine virtual machine" instances; machine types chosen by the studio on GKE Standard, or managed by Google on Autopilot, where Agones has "pre-configured opinionated constraints" (no Windows containers, minimum Pod resource requests)

Placement

Studio chooses the cluster's region or zone; Agones installs a ping service so clients can "determine which cluster to connect to based on latency"; for multi-cluster allocation, Agones now recommends "a Service Mesh in each of your Agones clusters"

Pricing

$0.10 per cluster per hour management fee, with a $74.40 monthly credit per billing account; Autopilot $0.0445 per vCPU-hour plus memory (us-central1, on-demand); Standard nodes billed at Compute Engine prices; internet egress $0.12 per GiB up to 1 TiB (Premium Tier, Iowa to North America)

Scalability

Up to 65,000 nodes per GKE Standard cluster and 5,000 per Autopilot cluster; "Not all node quota increases are automatic"; no game server load-test or deployment-rate figure published (as of Q4 2026)

Integration

Agones client SDK required: "The client SDKs are required for a game server to work with Agones", for Unreal Engine, Unity, C++, C#, Node.js, Go, Rust, Python and REST; matchmaking through open-source Open Match, named in Google's games FAQ

Support

24/7 for clients, free. Available on Discord, Slack, email

"Support for Game Servers is offered under the Premium support package" (minimum $15,000 per month, $180,000 per year by Edgegap calculation); Agones issues go to GitHub and community channels

Latency

58% average reduction vs. public cloud (Edgegap case study)

No latency measurements published for game servers on GKE (as of Q4 2026); clients can time Agones' HTTP and UDP ping service

Track Records

Agones co-developed by Google and Ubisoft since 2017, donated by Google to the CNCF (March 2026); DeNA named as running its dedicated game servers on GKE (Google Cloud blog, March 2023)

Clients

Learn more from clients who migrated to Edgegap

15 case studies are available from studios that moved to Edgegap from another platform.

Key reasons why they chose Edgegap

Key reasons why they chose Edgegap

Discover the impact of Edgegap's automated game server orchestration for a flawless multiplayer experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Edgegap is the hosting & orchestration experts. Our platform is tailor built to help you speed up your development process, which allows you focus on what you excel at - development.


We chose Agones specifically to avoid lock-in. Does this undo that?

It does not, and the reason is the artifact. What you push is a standard container image with nothing of ours inside it: no server SDK, no sidecar, no lifecycle calls in your binary. The same image runs anywhere that takes a container, whether that is your own cluster if you stand it back up or another provider entirely, and the only integration you would unwind is one HTTP call in your backend. The flexibility you kept Agones for stays with you on the orchestration side too. Reserve compute that is yours alone with Private Fleets, in the locations you choose, or run on multi-tenant Edge Cloud with reserved vCPU and memory and pay for the deployments you actually use, or split the two and move the line whenever your traffic moves. You decide where servers run and how they scale. What you hand over is the operating of it, not the control of it.

What replaces Fleet and FleetAutoscaler?

Private Fleets, for capacity that stays yours: dedicated bare metal with egress-free hosting, rightsized monthly rather than tuned with replicas and autoscaler policies. Hybrid orchestration combines them with Edge Cloud to keep hosting cost-effective, with nothing to configure: when a Private Fleet is full, deployments overflow onto Edge Cloud, each created for the match that needs it, provisioned from scratch in 2 seconds, median, measured to container ready, before the game engine starts. The buffer you keep today to cover provisioning time is not needed, which is also where a large part of the saving lives.

What happens to the Agones SDK calls in my server?

They come out and nothing proprietary replaces them. Ready(), Health(), Allocate(), Reserve() and Shutdown() all go, along with the SDK sidecar in the pod spec and the GRPC and HTTP port variables it used. On Edgegap your server reads its public IP and port mapping from environment variables at deployment and is ready as soon as it listens. Match metadata you carried as labels or annotations travels as environment variables on the deploy request instead.

We run multi-cluster allocation across regions. How does that map?

It collapses into one endpoint. Today you keep clusters in each region, an allocator in front of them, and policy deciding which cluster serves a request. On Edgegap you send one deploy request with the players' locations and it is placed at the best available location on the network at request time. There is no topology to maintain, no cross-cluster policy to keep in sync, and no per-region capacity to provision ahead of demand. If you want capacity in specific places, that is what Private Fleets are for: bare metal in the locations you choose, with automatic overflow to Edge Cloud rather than to another cluster you own.

Is this actually cheaper than running our own clusters?

On compute alone we are in a strong position, and you can check it against your own rates rather than take our word for it. Edge Cloud is $0.00115 per vCPU per minute, fractionable from 0.25 vCPU, at a single price worldwide, and Private Fleets are $0.0261 per vCPU per hour with egress-free hosting. If your cloud pricing is close to list, the gap is usually large. If you have negotiated well, volume pricing narrows it and then keeps going as you grow. Harder to put in a spreadsheet, and usually worth more: hybrid orchestration keeps hosting cost-effective by combining bare metal Private Fleets with Edge Cloud, and you rebalance the two whenever your traffic moves, instead of buying for peak all year. Then there is what you stop maintaining. Your integration is already built, so that cost is behind you, but the upkeep is not. An industry benchmark puts ongoing maintenance at 15 to 25 percent of build cost annually, before the evolution work that arrives with every new region, platform and engine version. Autoscaling, analytics and monitoring come with the platform, so tuning cost and performance happens in a dashboard rather than in your sprint. Model your own traffic in the pricing calculator.

Can we keep part of what we built?

Yes, and more of it than you might expect. You keep your game server image and your netcode untouched. You keep your backend and the allocation model you designed: one request in, an address and port back. And you keep capacity that is yours, in the locations you choose, through Private Fleets, which is the part of self-hosting most worth keeping: predictable, dedicated, egress-free. What you add is an orchestrator you do not have to build or maintain, already deploying game servers every day for 1,600+ studios, improved on our payroll rather than yours. Teams usually start by pointing one region at Edgegap and running it beside the cluster they already have for a week, then move the rest once it is uneventful. Nothing requires a hard cutover.

Methodology

How we measured

Each metric states what is measured, over what window, and what is excluded. Benchmark results are dated to the test that produced them and are not restated as current figures.

Orchestration Platform Scale

Where servers can run, and how many we have run.

Inventory

Global Edge Cloud locations

615+locations

Distinct deployment targets where a game server container can be scheduled on demand.

Platform inventory
How we measure this
Live

Private Fleet locations

58locations

Locations where a studio can reserve Private Fleet hosts for its exclusive use.

Published live
How we measure this
Cumulative

Game server deployments to date

135million deployments

Total game server deployments orchestrated since February 2019, including deployments that failed to start, the same basis our competitors use.

Since February 2019
How we measure this

Performance Under Load

How fast our orchestration delivers a server, and what it sustains under test.

Rolling 30d

Server deployment time

2seconds · median

From cold start: provisioned from scratch, not allocated onto an already-running server. Measured to container ready, before the game engine starts.

Rolling 30-day window
How we measure this
Benchmark

Sustained deployment rate for each game

40per second

Started deployments per second, averaged over a continuous 60-minute benchmark. The standard rate for each game from confirmed studios with live traffic; higher rates are available on request.

November 2023 benchmark
How we measure this
Benchmark

Concurrent capacity for each game

14million concurrent

Concurrent sessions reached on real game server containers, at 100 players per server.

November 2023 benchmark
How we measure this

Reliability

What we commit to contractually for our orchestration, and what the monitors record.

Committed

Availability

99.99%SLA commitment

Committed under our SLA. Trailing 90-day measured uptime: 99.999%.

Trailing 90 days
How we measure this
Inventory

Provider redundancy

17+providers

Cloud and bare-metal providers under contract and carrying production traffic. Failover is automatic.

Platform inventory
How we measure this

Live component status is published at status.edgegap.com.

How We Measure

One entry per metric: what is measured, how, and over what window.

Global Edge Cloud locations

A location is a distinct deployment target: one datacenter site at one of our infrastructure providers, in which a game server container can be scheduled on demand. Sites are counted once each regardless of how many providers operate in the same metro, and count only while accepting deployments.

Back to the metric ↑
Private Fleet locations

Counted separately from the 615+ Edge Cloud locations, which are on-demand cloud capacity: a Private Fleet location is a site where a studio reserves hosts for its exclusive use. Published live on the Fleet Manager page. Each Private Fleet host includes 6 TB of egress per month.

Back to the metric ↑
Game server deployments to date

Counted as total deployment records since February 2019, including deployments that failed to start, the same basis our competitors use.

Back to the metric ↑
Server deployment time

From cold start: provisioned from scratch, not allocated onto an already-running server. Measured to container ready, before the game engine starts.

Back to the metric ↑
Sustained deployment rate for each game

The orchestrator started real game server containers continuously for 60 minutes, averaging 40 started deployments per second over the full hour, counted at deployment start rather than at ready state. Measured across 550+ locations and 17 providers in November 2023. The benchmark ran for a single game. Capacity is allocated per game, so every game on the platform can scale to this level independently and at the same time. 40 per second is the standard rate. Studios that need more can plan a higher rate with us: in an October 2026 client load test, deployments peaked at 70 per second, with 85 in a single second, through the same production API and scheduler every customer uses, with no measurable impact on other customers. How we ran the test.

Back to the metric ↑
Concurrent capacity for each game

In November 2023, the platform sustained 40 game server deployments per second for 60 minutes across 550+ locations and 17 providers, reaching 14 million concurrent sessions at 100 players per server. Game servers were real containers; player clients were simulated. The benchmark ran for a single game. Capacity is allocated per game, so every game on the platform can scale to this level independently and at the same time.

Back to the metric ↑
Availability

Availability is committed at 99.99% under our SLA and measured continuously against five independently monitored components: Container Registry, Dashboard, Public API, Public Documentation and Website. Trailing 90-day measured uptime: 99.999%. The live figure is published on status.edgegap.com.

Back to the metric ↑
Provider redundancy

Distinct suppliers under contract and carrying production traffic, counted at corporate-entity level. Failover across providers is automatic; it is the premise of the multi-cloud architecture.

Back to the metric ↑

How We Keep This Current

What gets reviewed, on what cadence, and what carries its own date.

Platform figures on this page are reviewed and refreshed quarterly. Metrics drawn from live sources (availability and game server deployments) carry their own as-of dates and are updated as measured. Benchmark results are dated to the test that produced them and are not restated as current figures.

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