There’s a couple of providers that give you that kind of abstraction. Playfab is _pretty close_ but it’s fairly slow to ramp up and down. There is/was multiplay - they’ve had some changes recently and I’m not sure what their situation is right now. There’s also stuff like Hathora (they’re great but expensive).

At a previous job, we used azure container apps - it’s what you _want_ fargate to be. AIUI, Google Cloud Run is pretty much the same deal but I’ve no experience with it. I’ve considered deploying them as lambdas in the past depending on session length too…

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gcr 4 days ago | parent [-]

Cloud Run tries to be this but every service like this has quirks. For example, GCR doesn’t let you deploy to high-CPU/MEM instances, has lower performance due to multi-tenant hosts, etc

	▲	maccard 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		But that’s not what OP asked for. They asked for > As a hobbyist part of me wants the VM abstracted completely (which may not be realistic). I want to say “here’s my game server process, it needs this much cpu/mem/network per unit, and I need 100 processes” and not really care about the underlying VM(s), at least until later. The closest thing I’ve found to this is AWS fargate. You can’t have on demand usage with no noisy neighbours without managing the underlying VMs. I used hathora [0] at my previous job, (they’ve expanded since and I’m not sure how much this applies anymore) - they had a CLI tool which took a dockerfile and a folder and built a container and you could run it anywhere globally after that. Their client SDK contained a “get lowest latency location” that you could call on startup to use. It was super neat, but quite expensive! [0] https://hathora.dev/gaming