Alpha tests
Alpha tests are typically the first round of tests you’ll do for your game. You’ll run these early on in the development phase, and they can help you identify any underlying glitches, design choices, technical issues, and more.
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Alpha tests are typically the first round of tests you’ll do for your game. You’ll run these early on in the development phase, and they can help you identify any underlying glitches, design choices, technical issues, and more.
Read moreAnti-cheat software checks for wall hacks, aimbots, boosting, and even whether players are using scripts to cheat.
Read moreAn authoritative server is the single trusted instance that runs your game's logic and determines what is true in a match — no client can override it, which makes cheating structurally impossible.
Read moreAuto scaling for game servers is the ability to start new server instances on demand as player load increases, and release them when demand drops — without manual intervention.
Read moreYour backend is everything that’s invisible to the player. It’s all the tools and services behind the scenes.
Read moreA bare-metal server is a physical machine which lives inside a data centre. It’s a place where you’ll host your games matches and sessions.
Read moreBeats is a family of lightweight data shippers in the Elastic Stack that collect logs, metrics, and events from servers and forward them to Logstash or Elasticsearch.
Read moreBeta testing is when you get a group of players to test your game, typically when your game is close to launch day.
Read moreA Content Delivery Network is a network that hosts the same content in multiple places to get it to the end user faster.
Read moreClient-server architecture is where you have external machines that host your game’s server and players can connect to it.
Read moreYour cloud server is a virtual server. It runs in a cloud computing environment, and it's a place where you’ll host your games’ matches and sessions.
Read moreContainerisation packages your game server, its dependencies, and configuration into a single portable image that runs consistently across any infrastructure — local, cloud, or bare metal.
Read moreA container is a packaged set of applications and software. But for your case, it’ll be a packaged version of your entire game, or any updates you need to send out.
Read moreContinuous integration is when you regularly merge changes to your code from multiple people into one version.
Read moreA data center is a building or place which you’d use to store all of your servers. They house any critical or large amounts of data, but you’d also use them to process and manage all of that data.
Read moreA data packet is a chunk of game data — player position, inputs, events — transmitted across the network. Packet size and send rate directly affect latency and bandwidth consumption.
Read moreA Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDos) attack is where criminals attempt to overload your servers and cause them to crash.
Read moreA dedicated server is a remote machine that runs your game's logic independently of any player's client, acting as the authoritative source of truth for every match.
Read moreDeployment is the process of releasing a game server build to live infrastructure — containerising it, pushing it to a registry, and orchestrating instances for players to connect.
Read moreDocker is a specific piece of software that combines your game, libraries, and config files into a single container.
Read moreDowntime is when a machine, or computer, crashes or is out of action. It’s rare, but can happen, especially during peak times.
Read moreAn edge node is a physical or virtual machine that acts as a bridge between a local network and the internet.
Read moreThe Elastic Stack (ELK) is an open-source suite for ingesting, storing, and visualizing operational data, built from Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats.
Read moreElasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine used to index, store, and query large volumes of game server logs, telemetry, and operational data at speed.
Read moreFailover is the automatic switching to a backup system when a primary server or provider fails, keeping your game online for players without requiring manual intervention from your team.
Read moreFlex metal servers are basically bare-metal machines, but you can have them available in the same amount of time as cloud servers.
Read moreGame server orchestration is the automated management of dedicated multiplayer game servers — handling session scheduling, scaling, placement, health monitoring, and failover across one or more infrastructure providers through a single control layer.
Read moreA headless server is a game server process that runs without any graphics rendering, display output, or audio — only the game logic and network stack, making it far cheaper and faster to run at scale.
Read moreIdle machines are server instances that are provisioned and ready but not running an active session. Keeping a warm pool of idle machines reduces game server start-up latency for players.
Read moreA game server image is the packaged, executable version of your dedicated server code — built once and deployable to any infrastructure that supports running containers.
Read moreGame server infrastructure is the combined hardware and software that hosts your dedicated servers, handles player connections, and keeps multiplayer sessions running reliably at scale.
Read moreInfrastructure automation is the practice of provisioning, configuring, and scaling servers using code rather than manual processes, reducing human error and speeding up deployments.
Read moreKibana is the visualization layer of the Elastic Stack, letting you build dashboards, explore logs, and monitor game server metrics stored in Elasticsearch in real time.
Read moreLatency is how fast data is moving. How quickly does it get from point A to point B? (And it’s generally measured in milliseconds.)
Read moreLoad balancing distributes incoming player connections or session requests across multiple servers so no single machine becomes a bottleneck, keeping your game responsive under heavy traffic.
Read moreLogstash is a data pipeline that ingests logs and events from multiple sources, normalizes them into a consistent format, and forwards the data to Elasticsearch for storage and analysis.
Read moreYour matchmaker decides which players to group up for a session. It grabs information from each player and then runs it through a set of rules to figure out the best possible match.
Read moreA microservice is a small, independently deployable component handling one specific function — such as matchmaking, authentication, or session management — within a larger game backend.
Read moreMonitoring tracks known metrics — CPU, memory, session counts, latency — and alerts when values cross a threshold, helping teams catch problems before players are impacted.
Read moreNetcode refers to the networking code that synchronises game state between players. Poor netcode causes lag, rubber-banding, and hit registration issues in multiplayer games.
Read moreNetwork egress is the cost cloud providers charge for data leaving their network — for game servers, this is typically the largest hidden infrastructure expense and the one studios most often underestimate.
Read moreObservability is the ability to understand your system's internal state from its outputs — logs, metrics, and traces — answering not just that something is wrong, but why.
Read moreAn orchestrator is the software layer that automates the lifecycle of game server instances — starting sessions on demand, placing them in the optimal region, and shutting them down when matches end.
Read morePeer-to-peer is when you designate one player as the host of a session, and the other players connect to their machine. Whereas client-side servers are external machines which hosts your game’s sessions.
Read moreA relay server forwards network traffic between players without running any game logic — it solves NAT traversal and connectivity problems but does not make your game authoritative or cheat-resistant.
Read moreA code repository is the version-controlled store for your game's source code and assets — the shared history your team uses to track changes, manage branches, and trigger deployments.
Read moreA resource profile will figure out how many resources your game will take, and in turn, how much compute power a server needs to reserve to run your game.
Read moreA sandbox environment is an isolated, non-production area where developers can safely test game server builds and integrations without affecting live players or incurring production costs.
Read moreScalability is a multiplayer game infrastructure’s ability to handle increases in player demand — more concurrent sessions, more regions, more traffic — without degrading performance or requiring manual intervention.
Read moreA server fleet is the pool of game server instances — running or on standby — that an orchestration platform manages on behalf of a studio, scaling up and down in response to player demand.
Read moreServer regions are geographic locations where game servers are hosted. Placing servers close to your players is the single most effective way to reduce latency and improve the multiplayer experience.
Read moreA serverless game server is a dedicated server session that spins up on demand when players need it and is terminated when the session ends — you pay only for active play time, with no idle servers sitting unused.
Read moreSession hosting is when a server, or computer, runs your game’s matches. Each match, with a set group of people, is considered a session.
Read moreSoft launching is when you release your game to a specific market or a restricted audience, before your full launch.
Read moreStaging is the final pre-launch environment where your game runs in production-like conditions, letting you validate server builds and configuration before real players connect.
Read moreTick rate is how often a game refreshes its information. Usually, it’s measured in hertz. For example, a 128-tick server will update 128 times a second.
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