Why Per-Cloud Custom Code Fails at Scale

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Building tailored integrations for each cloud provider produces a growing gap between providers. Each new provider feature demands more custom code, and that code slows down everything else. Ubisoft’s answer was to let Kubernetes and CNCF projects define the operational model. Workloads now run on any cloud or on-prem with minimal friction, and the team benefits from improvements driven by thousands of open-source contributors rather than maintaining those capabilities in-house.

Authoritative Game Servers: A Special Kubernetes Problem

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Authoritative multiplayer servers hold all game state in memory. Every player in a match connects to one server, and that server is the sole authority on what happens inside the game. Shutting it down mid-session crashes the game. Standard Kubernetes has no concept of a “session in progress.” Agones adds that concept, teaching Kubernetes how to host, scale, and orchestrate game servers without terminating an active session.

Rainbow Six Mobile: Millions of Sessions Across Regions

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Latency is the hard constraint for real-time gameplay, so game servers must sit close to players. Since Rainbow Six Mobile launched last month, millions of game sessions have run across multiple regions. Different regions hit different usage peaks and different availability conditions. The Agones-based infrastructure adapted dynamically, routing traffic and capacity to whichever cloud provider performed best at any given moment. That flexibility produced a stable global launch and fast scaling when player demand spiked.

Agones Joins the CNCF Sandbox

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Agones became a CNCF sandbox project the week of this keynote. The project has operated in the industry for eight years. Ubisoft is one user among many. The slide shown during the talk listed a range of game companies also running Agones for their server workloads, several of them active contributors. Joining the CNCF puts Agones on the same footing as the infrastructure projects Ubisoft already depends on and opens a formal path for more studios to contribute upstream.

Notable Quotes

instead of chasing those differences, we flipped the model. We decided that our operational model will be defined by Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem. Jean-François Hubert · ▶ 00:32

if players are playing on the game server, you can’t shut it down, because that’s going to crash the game. Jean-François Hubert · ▶ 01:38

we’re very excited to be a brand new sandbox project in the CNCF as of literally last week. Mark Mandel · ▶ 01:49

Key Takeaways

  • Kubernetes plus CNCF projects replaced per-cloud custom code at Ubisoft.
  • Rainbow Six Mobile served millions of sessions across regions within its first month.
  • Agones entered the CNCF sandbox after eight years running production game servers.

About the Speaker(s)

Mark Mandel is a Staff Developer Advocate based in San Francisco, originally from Australia. He founded Agones, an open-source project for dedicated game server hosting on Kubernetes, and presented here in that capacity rather than as a Discord representative.

Jean-François Hubert is Development Director for Ubisoft’s Online Service Tech Foundations backend domains, responsible for core infrastructure covering content management, notifications, and large-scale deployment platforms. He has been with Ubisoft since 2010.