Hobbyist game dev here with random systemd thoughts. I’ve recently started to lean on systemd more as my ‘local game server process manager’ process. At first I thought I’d have to write this up myself as a whole slew of custom code, but then I realized the linux distros I use have systemd. That + cgroups and profiling my game server’s performance lets me pack an OS with as many game servers dynamically (target 80% resource utilization, funny things happen after that — things I don’t quite understand).
In this way I’m able to set up AWS EC2 instances or digital ocean droplets, a bunch of game servers spin up and report back their existence to a backend game services API. So far it’s working but this part of my project is still in development.
I used to target containerizing my apps, which adds complexity, but often in AWS I have to care about VMs as resources anyways (e.g. AWS gamelift requires me to spin up VMs, same with AWS EKS). I’m still going back and forth between containerizing and using systemd; having a local stack easily spun up via docker compose is nice, but with systemd what I write locally is basically what runs in prod environment, and there’s less waiting for container builds and such.
I share all of this in case there’s a gray beard wizard out there who can offer opinions. I have a tendency to explore and research (it’s fuuun!) so I’m not sure if I’m on a “this is cool and a great idea” path or on a “nobody does this because <reasons>” path.
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