My job is not to build games, but it is to make our booths engaging, and Battleships is my latest creation. The first version ran on EKS, which meant a mostly idle cluster for something that only runs a few days at a time.

And then I needed to think about re:Invent and its 65,000 attendees. When Lambda MicroVMs launched in June I rebuilt it, giving every player their own VM with its own dedicated memory and no shared state to fight over, scaling out as far as the queue at the booth demands.

You will learn the nuances I hit along the way, how the move changed the architecture once a game session had a whole machine to itself rather than a slice of a pod, and the constraints I am designing around for the moment a keynote ends and the expo hall fills up. I'll show the cost modelling against EKS and the instrumentation going in so that I will know the game is working before an attendee tells me it isn't.

What you'll learn

• Compare the cost of a persistently provisioned EKS cluster against per-session Lambda MicroVMs for spiky, short-lived workloads, using real modelling rather than intuition.
• Rework an architecture once a session owns a whole machine rather than a slice of a pod - which shared state disappears, and which new constraints take its place.
• Instrument a system so you know it is degrading before a user tells you, and design around the failure modes of a hard, unmovable traffic spike.

About the Speaker

Martin Thwaites is a Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb and a contributor to OpenTelemetry’s .NET libraries. He has spent the last seven years working in observability, following a twenty-year engineering career building large-scale systems. His focus is distributed tracing and telemetry pipelines in cloud-native environments. He advocates for observability as a core part of software engineering, something owned by the engineers building software, not just the teams operating it.