Fleet Updates

Common patterns and approaches for updating Fleets with newer and/or different versions of your GameServer configuration.

Rolling Update Strategy

When Fleets are edited and updated, the default strategy of Agones is to roll the new version of the GameServer out to the entire Fleet, in a step by step increment and decrement by adding a chunk of the new version and removing a chunk of the current set of GameServers.

This is done while ensuring that Allocated GameServers are not deleted until they are specifically shutdown through the game servers SDK, as they are expected to have players on them.

You can see this in the Fleet.Spec.Strategy reference, with controls for how much of the Fleet is incremented and decremented at one time:

  strategy:
    type: RollingUpdate
    rollingUpdate:
      maxSurge: 25%
      maxUnavailable: 25%

So when a Fleet is edited (any field other than replicas, see note below), either through kubectl edit/apply or via the Kubernetes API, this performs the following operations:

  1. Adds the maxSurge number of GameServers to the Fleet.
  2. Shutdown the maxUnavailable number of GameServers in the Fleet, skipping Allocated GameServers.
  3. Repeat above steps until all the previous GameServer configurations have been Shutdown and deleted.

Recreate Strategy

This is an optimal Fleet update strategy if you want to replace all GameServers that are not Allocated with a new version as quickly as possible.

You can see this in the Fleet.Spec.Strategy reference:

  strategy:
    type: Recreate

So when a Fleet is edited, either through kubectl edit/apply or via the Kubernetes API, this performs the following operations:

  1. Shutdown all GameServers in the Fleet that are not currently Allocated.
  2. Create the same number of the new version of the GameServers that were previously deleted.
  3. Repeat above steps until all the previous GameServer configurations have been Shutdown and deleted.

Two (or more) Fleets Strategy

If you want very fine-grained control over the rate that new versions of a GameServer configuration is rolled out, or if you want to do some version of A/B testing or smoke test between different versions, running two (or more) Fleets at the same time is a good solution for this.

To do this, create a second Fleet inside your cluster, starting with zero replicas. From there you can scale this newer Fleet up and the older Fleet down as required by your specific rollout strategy.

This also allows you to rollback if issues arise with the newer version, as you can delete the newer Fleet and scale up the old Fleet to its previous levels, resulting in minimal impact to the players.

GameServerAllocation Across Fleets

Since GameServerAllocation is powered by label selectors, it is possible to allocate across multiple fleets, and/or give preference to particular sets of GameServers over others. You can see details of this in the GameServerAllocation reference.

In a scenario where a new v2 version of a Fleet is being slowly scaled up in a separate Fleet from the previous v1 Fleet, we can specify that we prefer allocation to occur from the v2 Fleet, and if none are available, fallback to the v1 Fleet, like so:

apiVersion: "allocation.agones.dev/v1"
kind: GameServerAllocation
spec:
  required:
    matchLabels:
      game: my-awesome-game
  preferred:
    - matchLabels:
        agones.dev/fleet: v2

In this example, all GameServers have the label game: my-awesome-game, so the Allocation will search across both Fleets through that mechanism. The preferred label matching selector tells the allocation system to first search all GameServers with the v2 Fleet label, and if not found, search through the rest of the set.

The above GameServerAllocation can then be used while you scale up the v2 Fleet and scale down the original Fleet at the rate that you deem fit for your specific rollout.

Alpha Feature RollingUpdateOnReady

When this feature is enabled, Fleets will wait for the new GameSevers to become Ready during a Rolling Update, to ensure there is always a set of Ready GameServers before attempting to shut down the previous version Fleet’s GameServers.

This ensures a Fleet cannot accidentally have 0 GameServers Ready if something goes wrong during a Rolling Update, or GameServers have a long delay when moving to a Ready state.


Last modified September 22, 2020: Fix Fleets RollingUpdate (#1626) (dc561757)