Dependencies

• Pre-launch or Production plan: To make Cloud Deployments, you need to have a project with a "Pre-launch" or "Production" plan in the Metaplay Portal.

Key Concepts

• The Metaplay Cloud is a fully-managed, self-healing cloud platform hosted by Metaplay.
• The Metaplay Portal is a central platform for managing Metaplay Cloud resources and project settings.
• A Cloud Deployment consists of a game server and its supporting resources running in the Metaplay Cloud.

Overview

A Cloud Deployment refers to running a game server in the Metaplay Cloud instead of your local machine. By leveraging Cloud Deployments, you can make your game easily testable during development and globally available when the time is right.

Cloud Deployments also provide you with built-in tools for monitoring, scaling, and managing your game servers. Since we manage the cloud on your behalf, you don't have to worry about the technical details or maintenance of your game server infrastructure.

About Private Clouds

If you are on a "Private Cloud" plan, please visit the Introduction to Metaplay Cloud Infrastructure section for more advanced information about self-hosting game servers.

Metaplay Cloud & Portal

The Metaplay Portal is the central platform managing all your projects and their resources in the Metaplay Cloud.

Once you have enrolled in the Metaplay Portal, we will create an organization for you.

Here's what you should know:

• Organization: Your company. You can invite members to join your organization and manage their roles.
• Project: Your game. You can have multiple projects and manage them separately.
• Environment: Your Cloud Deployment targets. You can have multiple environments for each project.

After the initial project setup, you can use the Portal to track the status of your Deployments, manage your team members, and access the environment observability tools like logs and metrics.

🚧 Work In Progress

We are actively building and rolling out more self-service features to the Portal. For now, please contact us if something is missing or unclear!

About Cloud Environments

An environment is a pre-provisioned set of cloud resources to which you can make Cloud Deployments. You can use the Portal to view how each of your environments is doing and manage what members have access to them.

We have a few different types of environments that each have different underlying resources available to them. For example, development environments have limited resources and receive updates first, while production environments have scalable resources and are more stable.

In the environment detail page, you will find all essential information on how to set up game server Deployments, the status of the current Deployment, and links to the environment's tools.

About Cloud Deployments

After you have an environment to deploy to, you can follow the Getting Started with Cloud Deployments guide to make your first Deployment.

While it is possible to make a Deployment manually, we recommend setting up an automated Deployment pipeline via your CI system immediately instead. Your environment details page in the Portal will give you easy-to-follow steps for the most common CI environments.

Setting up automated Deployments is actually less effort than making manual Deployments and saves you a lot of effort almost immediately!

Managing Members & Roles

You can manage the members and their roles separately at the organization, project, and environment levels.

To invite new people, make sure they have a Metaplay Portal account and add them in the organization members page.

Once they are in the organization, you can assign them to projects. You can also assign them to environments if you want to give them access to a Deployment's resources like the LiveOps Dashboard, logs, and monitoring.

In the beginning, you might find it convenient for everyone to be admins, but as your team grows, you might want to assign more specific roles to your team members. For example, it is common to limit access to production environments for data privacy and security reasons.

Managing Cloud Deployments

Once you have a game server deployed to the cloud, you'll want to access the LiveOps Dashboard to monitor and manage the game.

We automatically sync the game server's users and roles with the ones you have defined in the environment details page in the Metaplay Portal. For example, giving a user the "game-admin" role for an environment will give them admin access to the LiveOps Dashboard for that environment.

🚧 Work In Progress

We currently only support the "game-admin" and "game-viewer" roles for environments. Custom roles are coming soon!

Next Steps

With this overview, you are ready to follow the Getting Started with Cloud Deployments guide to make your first Deployment.