Evaluation of a backend for computer games using a cloud service

Abstract: Cloud services are popular for hosting applications because they offer simplicity and cost efficiency. There are a lot of different providers offering many different services, which can make it hard to find the one most suitable for you. To make informed decisions you need to evaluate different services. This project evaluates a cloud service, called Amazon Lambda, from one of the biggest cloud service providers. Amazon Lambda is a simple service which runs one function in response to an event. In this project it is evaluated on suitability, performance and cost. To evaluate suitability, a certain kind of applications, games, were selected. The game industry is innovative and put high requirements on performance. A few simple Lambda functions were implemented and integrated in a prototype game. Some calculations were made for determining the cost of hosting such a game on Amazon Lambda. A few tests were implemented and run in order to further evaluate the performance.