Game Server Architecture and Deployment Questions

Architecture and deployment patterns for online game backends including dedicated servers, authoritative server models, hosted service architectures and serverless components; regional and multiregion deployment strategies to minimize player latency; session and connection management, state synchronization, tick rate and authoritative state design; load balancing, sharding and matchmaking strategies; scaling techniques including autoscaling, predictive scaling and warm pools; graceful shutdown, handoff and reconnection handling to preserve player experience; networking considerations such as UDP versus TCP, NAT traversal and rate limiting; deployment, CI CD and observability practices for game services, and trade offs between latency, consistency, cost and operational complexity.