An AWS hosted Valheim game server for about $0.12/hr (USD)
When not in use, game files live in version-enabled S3 is used for long-term storage.
Non-current versions are deleted after 10 days.
Runs on AWS ECS Fargate Spot instances using ephemeral storage.
Game files are re/de-hydrated from S3 on startup/shutdown.
If your spot instance is terminated — it takes about 3 minutes to restore (although I've never had this happen outside of testing), and unfortunately you get a new IP address. You shouldn't lose any data though, as the server performs a graceful shutdown and dehydrates your world onto S3.
For simplicity, everything assumes STACK_NAME is a static value - update as desired:
export STACK_NAME=pwmcintyreaws cloudformation deploy \
--stack-name ${STACK_NAME} \
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM \
--template-file ./template.yamlThe following starts the service and returns the Public IP and Password.
aws lambda invoke --function-name ${STACK_NAME}-start /dev/stdoutNOTE: This is idempotent - your can re-run this to return the current IP and password.
The following stops the service.
NOTE: The lambda waits until the service is inactive, an error may mean it's still running.
aws lambda invoke --function-name ${STACK_NAME}-stop /dev/stdoutYou may want to take an occasional offline backup.
aws s3 cp --recursive s3://BUCKET ./dataNOTE: Due to the global nature of S3 bucket names, it does not use ${STACK_NAME}, but the lambda returns the value.
https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/pricing/
- per vCPU per hour $0.04856
- 2 CPU (2048) = 2 * $0.04856 = $0.09712
- per GB per hour $0.00532
- 4 Mem (4GB) = 4 * $0.00532 = $0.02128
= 0.1184 per hour
= 2.8416 per day
= 85.248 per month
be sure to scale-down when not in use!
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- First 50 TB / Month $0.025 per GB
- PUT, COPY, POST, LIST requests (per 1,000 requests) $0.0055
- GET, SELECT, and all other requests (per 1,000 requests) $0.00044
= $0.25 per month
https://aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager/pricing/
- $0.40 per secret per month
= $0.40 per month
A: Yes and no — I only found solutions using CDK.
CDK is really great if you work in a team who wants to provide abstractions to another team. Eg. Your tooling team wants to make it easy for devs to create company-approved solutions (ie. with the right security features enabled, tagging, etc).
It otherwise adds unnecessary steps.
A: Docker.
This solution leverages a huge amount of work put into the lloesche/valheim-server-docker image.
Fargate allows me to deploy that image into AWS without thinking about servers.
A: Best Practice.
Honestly I'm on the fence on this one, you could save $0.40/month by just hard-coding a password into an env var.
🤷
A: Cost.
Although you get 1 complimentary Elastic IP with new AWS accounts, it costs $0.12/day while not in use. That's 43.8/year which I've decided to avoid.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
To ensure efficient use of Elastic IP addresses, we impose a small hourly charge when these IP addresses are not associated with a running instance or when they are associated with a stopped instance or unattached network interface.
A: Cost.
That's $0.50/month for the Hosted Zone, plus maybe $12/year for a domain.
https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/
I love PR's