Migrate from Photon Cloud to Photon Server

Kuroato

Hello all, I am very curious about the Migration Process from Photon Cloud to Photon Server.

Currently I am working on a new project that will be built using Photon Cloud for now... I don't have a need for using all of Photon Server's Custom Features so Photon Cloud will work just fine for now. But lets say in the near future I gain a Large Player Base and I feel it would be better to Host my Game on a Dedicated Photon Server for better Performance, Stability, Less Lag, etc... How Hard will it be to Migrate from Photon Cloud to Photon Server?

I would still use the Client-Side for Handling the Game Logic, Just Point to my own Photon Server, is it as simple as that? Or am I forced to Setup my Game Logic on my Photon Server itself in order to gain the performance benefits of a Dedicated Server?

If say I wanted to Migrate my Client-Side Game Logic to my Photon Server for Server-side Game Logic, how hard would that be?

Kaiserludi

Photon Cloud runs on dedicated hardware servers, not on virtual ones. Its just called cloud as it automatically handles stuff like scaling the needed amount of game servers for you.

We don't allow custom logic on the cloud to avoid the risk that a bug in one games custom logic could crash a server that also host game instances for other customers. As a result the stability on the cloud should not be lower than on a self hosted server, but in case that there is an issue you don't have to care about it, but our stuff does so, while with a custom server you would always have someone available for a potential crash at weekends, holidays or when it is in the middle of the night for the timezone in which your office is.

The LoadBalancing logic of Photon Cloud pays attention to stuff like CPU load, used percentage of RAM and bandwidth, etc. on each machine and puts new game rooms on servers with the most free resources. Also if the overall load increases, we just ramp up more servers.

As the cloud runs games for a lot of different developers, one server more or less only is a tiny bit of difference and we can make enough servers available, including reserves, without too much overhead, while for a single game, that just creates 101% of the load that one single server could handle, with a self hosted solution you would need a second server and end up with wasting 49,5% of your resources (assuming both servers have the same capacities).
This gets especially interesting with different regions: Latencies for players in Asia connecting to servers in Europe or the US are pretty bad, but even if you gain a player base big enough for dozens of servers in one part of the world, you may not get many players in another part of the world, so you may still run into that problem with capacity-jumps with only a few servers in a region.

For games with so many players that it makes sense financially, we also offer dedicated private clouds, where there whole cloud exclusively runs your game, so that may also be an option: Your own servers just for you (and on private clouds we even allow custom logic), but you still won't have to hire staff to manage, administrate and keep an eye on the servers. For private clouds special support contracts can get ordered for things like dedicated support stuff, extra short response times, etc.

Therefor the reasons that you have listed are not really good arguments against the Photon Cloud.
Also the idea of paying once for the server licenses instead of having to pay every month for the cloud only looks nice on the first view, because it's very hard to get traffic that cheap that the monthly costs of your own hardware would beat the cloud (1.000 CCU cause several TERAbytes of traffic a month).

You need to use Photon Server of course, if you need custom server side logic (at least as long as you don't have several thousand CCU as a private cloud will only make financial sense for you, if you have thousands of CCU) and it may make sense to use it in combination with Photon Cloud if a large part of your player base is in a part of the world for which there isn't a Photon Cloud region yet.



So lets pretend, you need to switch later on:
"Just Point to my own Photon Server, is it as simple as that?"
Yes, it's as simple as that. Your clients can stay exactly the same aside from having to connect to a different server address.
Just make sure that you chose the LoadBalancing application when configuring your server: That's the one that also runs on the cloud and also the only one that can handle multiple game servers, while the default application Lite is for single server usage (you can still run LoadBalancing on a single server, btw.).

Kuroato

again thank you so much for all of this info! very helpful!! Thank you for taking the time to explain all of this really appreciated.