Update: 2 New Machines, 1 Current Machine, and 1 New Region

[Infra 714 / 12,401]

Hi everyone,

 

I have a few cool updates I'd like to share with you all today. These updates involve two new machines we have acquired, our planned obsolescence of PHYSION-1 (Physion's dedicated machine for game servers), and progress on a potential region expansion!

 

It's been a while since one of these has been done. I will be working on changing that, so you should be hearing from me a lot more with giant (and probably boring) walls of text summarizing what GFL is up to! As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to leave a comment or message me on Discord.

 

 

A New Machine Naming Convention

 

Before we get into the new dedicated machines, Aurora and I sat down and discussed revamping our current naming scheme for dedicated machines. We felt that it was misleading (with machine numbers starting from a weird index instead of reflecting the actual count of machines) and that we needed to have the convention be far more consistent across the board along with showing useful regional information. Thus, I'm covering a brief overview of the proposed changes as it'll give good context to why some references later in this thread are with different names than ones we have usually used.

 

With that, we have decided on a simple naming convention that addresses the aforementioned issues. I will spare you all the exact schema and instead show some of the potential machine name changes:

 

- GS15 -> GS-US1 (GS = Game server, US = United States, 1 = Machine count based on identifier.)

- WEB1 -> WS-CA1 (WS = Web server, CA = Canada, 1 = Machine count based on identifier.)

 

The machine counts will not be incremented when a machine is replaced, rather, machine replacements will count as replacements for the same count identifier. For example, a replacement of GS-US1 will have the identifier remain as GS-US1 instead of changing to GS-US2. This should resolve an inconsistency we have with our current naming scheme, such as there being a gap between GS16 and GS18 (fun fact: there is no machine in between!)

 

This naming schema is still a work-in-progress as we try to iron out some larger details to ensure it doesn't need to be worried about in the future. That said, it will take a while before we slowly ease our infrastructure to the new scheme and we're not too worried about rushing it - however, we will be using it immediately for any new machines we get.

 

Upgraded Machine for GS-US4

 

(In this context, GS-US4 is our fourth game server dedicated machine in the US, provided by NFO)

 

We have recently acquired a new dedicated machine to replace our current NFO machine, replacing our Xeon E-2288G CPU (5GHz turbo) with the newer Xeon E-2388G (5.1GHz turbo) and faster DDR4 RAM, up to 3200 MHz from 2666 MHz!

 

This should be a decent upgrade for our CS:GO Zombie Escape server, which is our primary resident on this machine. We're still in the process of setting it up and ensuring a smooth transition, with Vauff and Snowy hard at work preparing the move for the ZE server, but we should hopefully have everything ready to go soon! 

 

The new machine will cost us $279.99 USD/mo, which is an increase from our previous machine's rate of $249.99 USD/mo.

 

Our Very First Dedicated Machine for Private Servers!

 

For context, GFL began offering CS:GO Surf Private Servers on April 3rd this year after quite a lot of demand from the community. The private servers aim to provide players and their friends an opportunity to privately grind out world records on our collection of maps without needing to worry about other players, while simultaneously supporting GFL.

 

Since we started the project, we have been using third-party hosting providers to host our game servers in our supported locations. While this worked great for us in the short term as we could support more locations without needing a significant presence around the world, we very quickly ran into issues keeping up with the demand and automating required processes. It was clear that we needed to ramp up our efforts to ensure everyone gets a chance at this, so we decided to set some goals and try pushing onward so we could start stocking locations with our own hardware.

 

I'm happy to announce that we've finally hit those goals, and we have placed the order for our very first machine dedicated solely to private servers! We are getting this machine from GSK and it will be set up with the rest of our current infrastructure in the Dallas data center. It's a moderate machine designed to keep costs low while ensuring it can support a fair number of servers, with a 12-thread AMD Ryzen 5 3600X that should comfortably support 10-12 low-pop CS:GO servers without any issues. We will be paying very close attention to how we allocate CPU resources/threads to each server, just like we do for our public game servers, to ensure that we make the most of the CPU without going overboard.

 

As a neat bit of insight, here is a snippet of our spreadsheet that shows how we allocate resources on our GS machines at the moment, with GS-US4 as an example (it's a new machine, so it's very empty!):

Spoiler

 

Another great benefit of having our own hardware for this is that we can work on automating more of the process. This takes a lot of stress off of everyone responsible for it, our "ideal" situation would be one where the system basically maintains itself. As of right now, our automation consists of a lot of GitLab CI/CD pipelines that allow @Dini to make mass changes and updates to the servers with one single move, as well as a Discord bot to help with automatically setting up and deploying servers with all needed files:

Spoiler

 

GSK has been brilliant with ensuring that we can get any future machines with exact/similar specs activated in Dallas within short time-frames, in the case we ever need to deal with any future surges in demand. 😄

 

Planned Removal of the PHYSION-1 Machine

 

We mentioned this in a Council meeting previously, and I'm happy to say that we are getting much closer to our goals to eventually drop the PHYSION-1 machine from our line-up. Part of this includes migrating all of our Unturned servers to our existing game server machines, which will result in a significant performance upgrade and save us approximately $150 USD/mo in expense!

 

As of right now, @Nick is hard at work re-creating our premium plugins from the ground up to replace the ones we currently have. This will give us full control over the quality of experience we offer along with freeing us from DRM restrictions currently in place with a lot of these plugins. Once this is complete, we should be able to begin the process of slowly migrating servers over to the new machine.

 

This move is a win-win for us, as our Unturned servers receive a huge performance boost (moving from an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3600 @ 4.1 GHz to an Intel i9-10900K @ 5.3 GHz) along with saving GFL at least $150 USD/mo in expense. You can read more about this in a document we shared during a past Council meeting here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cg2GpqOpxK4nN367tTmZVU-_JDiMVeXfDbVEoip5CIk/edit?usp=sharing

 

Our Potential Region Expansion - Australia!

 

I am beyond excited to announce that we will officially be looking into expanding into Australia! We're working on planning out our approach over the long term, and we are looking to commit to the expansion for at least 6 months - 1 year (we'll confirm all of this as we plan stuff out over time).

 

For our initial approach, we're probably going to be entering the region with a line-up of CS:GO servers, as the game is very popular in the region. CS:GO Surf will likely be our flagship going into the region! That said, our intention here is to start small and grow as we build up in the region, so we likely will be starting with only a few specific servers that have higher chances of succeeding.

 

We're already working on setting up our foundations here, with work being done to set up new web infrastructure to host an extended wing of the Surf API network that currently powers our many CS:GO Surf servers around the world. We will likely be implementing Cloudflare's Geo-Steering load balancing features to ensure that the network performs to high standards and operates on a good level of redundancy (i.e, one region's web services going down will not halt operations as traffic will be automatically routed to the other regions).

 

To start, we have set up a CS:GO Surf invite-only server in Sydney, hosted on our Private Server infrastructure. We have been inviting players to come and try out our Surf experience and begin competing in our diverse community for about a month now, with over 35 people on the list at the moment with many more to come! This was done to help promote ourselves in the region as well as gauge interest from players - that said, things seem to be going rather well, as we already have a few private server orders lined up in Sydney while they wait for us to plan out our full expansion with public servers.

 

The promotional surf server is also a great way for us to benchmark performance with our accessory services and the SurfAPI network as we plan out our expansion.

 

We are still evaluating potential hosting providers for dedicated machines in the region. That said, our base of operations will likely be in Melbourne and/or Sydney - this is where our infrastructure is likely to be located. This should cover a good part of Oceania, with great coverage of both Australia and New Zealand.  

 

This is still a work-in-progress, and we're hoping to have many more updates to come! We would like to take it slow this time instead of rushing it, this way we'll have more time to spend on ensuring that everything goes well. Our next steps will be to continue evaluating what we will need to make this happen, along with what servers we should try our hand at in the region.

 

P.S: If you're from the region and want to help out/be a part of this, feel free to shoot me a message!

 

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As mentioned near the start of this post and in the previous Council meeting, I will be doing more of these! I haven't been doing these at all when I really should have been, so please let me know if anyone has any ideas to make these better and/or more interesting for everyone.

 

One thing I would like to note is that these won't take away from any updates provided in the Council meetings, so we will continue to host updates on everything GFL at those meetings so everyone can ask questions live.