Why I am using Kubernetes for game dev?

Hi everyone!

It's a great time to share a post about an exciting new area I've been learning and building in. Game development has always been my goal since I started learning software development, but for various reasons, I've always been busy with other projects.

But enough about the past. Kubernetes is a truly exciting technology that I discovered while working as a solo developer on my backend and frontend projects.

My Current Stack

• DigitalOcean - A hosting platform with reasonable pricing that's perfect for my indie projects. I want to thank the company for always being open to help, providing credits, and offering competitive prices.

• Containership.io - A fantastic platform for provisioning Kubernetes on DigitalOcean. (I don't have any credits from them, but their platform has saved me significant time). While DigitalOcean now provides Kubernetes out of the box, I found it challenging as a beginner, especially when dealing with pods, services, and SSL certificate setup. This might just be my experience - I had better luck when I had full access to Kubernetes.

• Kubernetes - It's not just about microservices. Think of it as Heroku but with complete control through simple recipes.

• Gitlab - A source control platform with free container registry for each repository.

What My Cluster Hosts

• https://api.balconygames.com - A Go server communicating with PostgreSQL (3 replicas)
• https://dashboard.balconygames.com - A ReactJS admin dashboard for game management (nginx + static)
• https://sweety-jumper.balconygames.com - A Unity game (nginx + static) currently in development mode due to network issues
• https://balconygames.com - Jekyll site (nginx + static)
• PostgreSQL (deployed using helm recipes)
• Letsencrypt for monitoring SSL certificates and creating new ones

The entire setup costs me about $40 per month (3 nodes at $10 each plus 1 Node Balancer), which is remarkably affordable for these resources.

My Workflow as a Solo Backend Developer

1. Make code changes
2. Rebuild the image and push to Gitlab registry
3. Run kubectl apply -f recipe/<name of the app>/deployment.yml which contains <image_name>:latest or <image_name>:$COMMIT_TAG

My next step is to move this process away from my local machine and use Gitlab pipelines instead. This setup is easy to support and deploy, and it saves me valuable time.

If I ever need to set up Redis or other databases, I'll use the helm tool with predefined recipes to create pods, services, and deployments.

Our game is Sweety Jumper