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Valheim on AWS

An AWS hosted Valheim game server for about $0.12/hr (USD)

Storage

When not in use, game files live in version-enabled S3 is used for long-term storage.

Non-current versions are deleted after 10 days.

Game Server

Runs on AWS ECS Fargate Spot instances using ephemeral storage.

Game files are re/de-hydrated from S3 on startup/shutdown.

If your spot instance is terminated — it takes about 3 minutes to restore (although I've never had this happen outside of testing), and unfortunately you get a new IP address. You shouldn't lose any data though, as the server performs a graceful shutdown and dehydrates your world onto S3.

Usage

For simplicity, everything assumes STACK_NAME is a static value - update as desired:

export STACK_NAME=pwmcintyre

Deploy

aws cloudformation deploy \
  --stack-name ${STACK_NAME} \
  --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM \
  --template-file ./template.yaml

Start

The following starts the service and returns the Public IP and Password.

aws lambda invoke --function-name ${STACK_NAME}-start /dev/stdout

NOTE: This is idempotent - your can re-run this to return the current IP and password.

Stop

The following stops the service.

NOTE: The lambda waits until the service is inactive, an error may mean it's still running.

aws lambda invoke --function-name ${STACK_NAME}-stop /dev/stdout

Offline backup

You may want to take an occasional offline backup.

aws s3 cp --recursive s3://BUCKET ./data

NOTE: Due to the global nature of S3 bucket names, it does not use ${STACK_NAME}, but the lambda returns the value.

Pricing

Host

https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/pricing/

  • per vCPU per hour $0.04856
    • 2 CPU (2048) = 2 * $0.04856 = $0.09712
  • per GB per hour $0.00532
    • 4 Mem (4GB) = 4 * $0.00532 = $0.02128
= 0.1184 per hour
= 2.8416 per day
= 85.248 per month

be sure to scale-down when not in use!

Storage

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

  • First 50 TB / Month $0.025 per GB
  • PUT, COPY, POST, LIST requests (per 1,000 requests) $0.0055
  • GET, SELECT, and all other requests (per 1,000 requests) $0.00044
= $0.25 per month

Secret

https://aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager/pricing/

  • $0.40 per secret per month
= $0.40 per month

Decision Log

Q: Hasn't this been done before?

A: Yes and no — I only found solutions using CDK.

CDK is really great if you work in a team who wants to provide abstractions to another team. Eg. Your tooling team wants to make it easy for devs to create company-approved solutions (ie. with the right security features enabled, tagging, etc).

It otherwise adds unnecessary steps.

Q: Why Fargate?

A: Docker.

This solution leverages a huge amount of work put into the lloesche/valheim-server-docker image.

Fargate allows me to deploy that image into AWS without thinking about servers.

Q: Why Secrets Manager?

A: Best Practice.

Honestly I'm on the fence on this one, you could save $0.40/month by just hard-coding a password into an env var.

🤷

Q: Why no static IP?

A: Cost.

Although you get 1 complimentary Elastic IP with new AWS accounts, it costs $0.12/day while not in use. That's 43.8/year which I've decided to avoid.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

To ensure efficient use of Elastic IP addresses, we impose a small hourly charge when these IP addresses are not associated with a running instance or when they are associated with a stopped instance or unattached network interface.

Q: Why no DNS?

A: Cost.

That's $0.50/month for the Hosted Zone, plus maybe $12/year for a domain.

https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/

Contribution

I love PR's

References

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