Source: https://gameye.com/glossary/server-fleet/ --- title: "Server Fleet | Gameye" description: "A server fleet is the pool of game server instances — running or on standby — managed by an orchestration platform, scaling up and down with player demand." --- # Server Fleet A 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. When a matchmaker groups players together, it doesn’t start a server from scratch — that would take too long. Instead, it requests a session from a fleet of pre-provisioned servers that are ready and waiting. The fleet absorbs incoming session requests, assigns players to available servers, starts new instances when capacity is running low, and terminates idle ones when demand falls. ## What fleet management involves Running a fleet is more than just keeping servers alive. A fleet manager needs to: - **Maintain a buffer** of warm, available sessions so matchmaking requests are fulfilled in milliseconds rather than the 30–60 seconds it takes to cold-start a container - **Scale across regions** — players in Asia need servers in Asia; a single-region fleet creates unacceptable latency for global games - **Handle failures** — if a node goes down, sessions need to be redistributed without players losing their match - **Manage image versions** — when you push a game update, the fleet needs to drain sessions on the old version, pull the new image, and make it available without downtime - **Track capacity** — know at any moment how many slots are available per region, per version, per node pool Building this yourself with AWS GameLift, Agones, or raw cloud infrastructure is the work of a dedicated DevOps engineer. It’s the core of what a managed orchestration platform like Gameye provides as a service. ## Fleet size and billing Most studios don’t pay for a fleet of fixed size — they pay for sessions consumed. The fleet scales automatically: small overnight, large at peak times, and the studio is billed only for what runs. This is fundamentally different from reserving a fixed number of game servers, where you pay for idle capacity regardless of whether players are in sessions. The economics of a well-managed fleet compound over time. A fleet that maintains only a small warm buffer (enough to handle typical demand spikes with a short lead time) costs far less than one that keeps a large standing inventory “just in case.” Getting this balance right — low idle cost, fast response to demand spikes — is one of the core engineering problems that orchestration platforms solve. ## Fleet management in practice When Nakama’s matchmaker finds a group of players, it calls Gameye’s Fleet Manager. The Fleet Manager checks available capacity in the player’s preferred region, allocates a session from the warm pool, returns the IP and port, and instructs the pool to spin up a replacement instance to maintain the buffer. The entire exchange takes milliseconds. Players join a server that was already running and waiting — they never experience the cold-start delay. **See also:** [Orchestrator](https://gameye.com/glossary/orchestrator/) · [Auto scaling](https://gameye.com/glossary/auto-scaling/) · [Session hosting](https://gameye.com/glossary/session-hosting/) · [Idle machines](https://gameye.com/glossary/idle-machines/) · [How Gameye manages game server fleets globally](https://gameye.com/how-it-works/) Building a multiplayer game? Gameye hosts dedicated game servers: ship your server as a Docker container and start one per match with a single API call, in a region near your players. [See how it works →](https://gameye.com/how-it-works/) [Back to Glossary](https://gameye.com/glossary/) ## Related terms - ### Orchestrator An orchestrator automates game server lifecycle — starting sessions on demand, placing them in the optimal region, and shutting them down when matches end. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/orchestrator/) - ### Auto scaling Auto scaling starts new game server instances as player load rises and releases them when demand drops — no manual intervention required. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/auto-scaling/) - ### Session hosting Session 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 more](https://gameye.com/glossary/session-hosting/) - ### Idle machines An idle machine is a provisioned server that's powered on and ready but not running a game session — on standby, waiting to be allocated. Idle capacity speeds up player starts but costs money while it waits. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/idle-machines/) - ### Bare-metal servers A 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 more](https://gameye.com/glossary/bare-metal-servers/)