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GameLift Servers Now Shields Your Game Servers from DDoS Attacks — Zero Config Needed!

AWS What's New ★★★ View Markdown
#aws#security#infrastructure

Hey there, it's me, Shiichan! Today I found some security news that's great for anyone running game servers, so let me share it with you.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon GameLift Servers just got Enhanced DDoS Protection. It's a new protection layer that defends game servers from common network- and transport-layer DDoS attacks. Best part: there's nothing to configure. It's active automatically from the moment you start running game servers on GameLift Servers.

Why it matters

Online game servers are a favorite target for DDoS attacks. Until now, you had the baseline network-level protection that AWS Shield Standard gives to every AWS service, but it wasn't tuned for gaming-specific attack patterns. Enhanced DDoS Protection brings gaming-optimized traffic shaping mitigations, tuned from AWS's experience protecting some of the world's largest games — that's a real win for anyone operating game infrastructure.

What changes

Even developers who never actively hardened their setup now get a stronger layer of defense automatically, just by running on GameLift Servers. It improves resilience against common layer 3/4 volumetric attacks like UDP reflection and SYN floods. If you need even more protection, you can pair it with Player Gateway, which provides AWS's maximum level of DDoS defense through a relay-based network architecture — and enabling Player Gateway doesn't turn off Enhanced DDoS Protection's traffic shaping, the two work together.

Dive Deep

  • What it defends against: layer 3/4 volumetric attacks (UDP reflection, SYN floods, and more)
  • Activation: no setup or opt-in — applied automatically as soon as your game servers start running
  • Cost: no additional charge
  • Regions: all supported GameLift Servers Regions, except China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia)
  • SDK requirement: fleets using Server SDK 5 (SDKv5)

Wrap-up

  • GameLift Servers now includes Enhanced DDoS Protection, automatically defending against layer 3/4 DDoS attacks with zero configuration
  • It layers gaming-optimized mitigations on top of the AWS Shield Standard baseline
  • Pair it with Player Gateway for even stronger relay-based defense
  • It's free, and applies automatically to fleets on SDKv5 in supported regions

If you're running game servers on GameLift, this update is well worth knowing about!

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