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

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.

## 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!