36 ms·
Revised and much faster, run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
- feld 11y agoThis is impressive, but you should probably not use his AMI unless you use your own uniquely generated OpenVPN certificates/keys
- micro-ram 11y agoAgreed. Only use the provided AMI for testing and learning how to create your own.
- TheGRS 11y agoI really appreciate a guide that takes you through the process, giving me a chance to understand all of the steps, before sharing the pre-packaged solution at the bottom. I was a little surprised by the cost as well. At the rate that I'm gaming these days it would be like $10-20 per month, that's pretty damn good (price of games not included obviously).
- PaulHoule 11y agoWhen I see the 50 cent an hour price, I think of the old days when I'd pay 25 cents for one play of Pac-Man. Say you allocate another 50 cents an hour for software then you are getting to a $20 or $40 a month spend which is getting in the range of a good video game habit. This leg could support sales of an AAA product and also could probably fund AA games. Get your configuration right and you have a system for multiplayer games with pretty low latency behind the servers -- even if the video gets screwed up, the games will always stay in sync. It is no way an accident that the costs wind up like that because everybody else is thinking about "Can I replace $X spent on hardware with $Y a hour spend in EC2."
- ortuna 11y agoI wonder why this works better than the Steam In-Home Streaming. I could never get it to be close to 60fps. The video suggests 60fps.
- codewithcheese 11y agoIm testing it now, but my guess is because you have your own allocated hardware for whatever purpose you desire. Where in house stream is more like 'sharing'
- jon-wood 11y agoI imagine having the equivalent of two GTX 680 GPUs probably helps here, those cards are no slouch generally, and these ones have been especially put together to handle streaming games.
- WA 11y agoAnyone tried to play competitive multiplayer games like CS or Heroes of the Storm with such a setup? I can imagine that streaming adds a bit of latency, which isn't a problem in singleplayer games, but could add too much lag for fast-paced multiplayer games. Any experiences?
- richardboegli 11y agoNot yet, but I'll spin up an instance in the next day or two and try the New Unreal Tournament and report back. https://www.unrealtournament.com/ https://www.unrealtournament.com/
- WA 11y agoThat would be great. I might try it myself, too. Currently, I'm gaming on a MacBook Air 2013. Works alright, but I play Heroes of the Storm on low settings and it could indeed be a bit nicer :)
- jleight 11y agoI have a VMware ESXi box at home that I use to run a Windows VM with a video card passed through. I've been using it to stream Heroes of the Storm with Steam's In-Home Streaming and I get a consistent 30 FPS (1920x1080) with no noticeable lag. Admittedly, it's not exactly the same as the setup in this article since it's not streaming over the internet, but I would assume that as long as your latency is low and bandwidth is high, you'll have no problem with this setup.
- WA 11y agoI'm just wondering. Theoretically, you have an additional hop. Game server <--> Amazon <--> Home From a pure latency point of view, this is probably not an issue. However, whatever events you see on screen, the game server sees you reacting slower, because your keyboard basically has a delay of 20-30ms (Home --> Amazon). Maybe, it depends a bit on the game you play, if this has any negative consequences or not. Edit: This could be somewhat compensated by the faster connection of Amazon <--> Game server (just assuming that it's faster than a connection from home).
- programminggeek 11y agoAm I ridiculous for wanting this to be a sort of on demand service with a small markup?
- infecto 11y agoNot ridiculous at all. Seems like a nice logical step from the failed business attempt of ...forgot the name but the company that provided streaming service but had lock-in of games on their platform.
- danneu 11y agoWas it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive?
- acgourley 11y agoOnLive and https://www.gaikai.com/ https://www.gaikai.com/ (acquired by sony)
- ncallaway 11y agoOnLive and Gaikai were the big two that I remember. Gaikai was acquired by Sony, and OnLive failed and parts of it were also sold off to Sony.
- mastax 11y agoI wonder how much of this post is covered by patents now owned by Sony.
- jerf 11y agoYou're basically combining three parts, Steam Streaming, nVidia's hardware stuff, and OpenVPN. OpenVPN and all the high-level ideas it embodies definitely predates Gankai or anything like that. Steam Streaming and nVidia's stuff are certainly going to be covered by their own patents. In theory the combination could be patented but I'd argue for "a network stream can be run over a VPN" is firmly "obvious to those skilled in the art"... network streams are network streams are network streams. Sony et al probably have more specific patents for their own setups, but to the extent they cover this setup they'd either be obvious, or they'd be trying to sue you for doing stuff covered under nVidia or Valve's patents. This, alas, doesn't necessarily protect you, but would certainly raise some PR issues. Plus Amazon might have some questions as well, since they don't want people getting hit for using cloud services to do things; anything that smells like special cloud licensing just because you're doing X "but in the cloud!" is going to hurt their business model. I can't guarantee they have nothing to sue over, but the costs/benefits would not seem to argue in favor of Sony suing.
- bhear 11y agoHas anyone thought of selling preconfigured cloud gaming services?
- TranquilMarmot 11y agoOh, you mean OnLive? http://onlive.com/ http://onlive.com/
- giancarlostoro 11y agoThere's also the Nvidia Grid for the Nvidia Shield (which you could plug into a 4K TV to play on, and play using a wireless controller): http://shield.nvidia.com/grid-game-streaming http://shield.nvidia.com/grid-game-streaming But maybe it's not quite what you want, since it's limited to their games. Never personally tried it though.
- kenrikm 11y agoGrid is meh, but using the shield to play PC games anywhere in the house is a win. (I use the shield portable)
- dikaiosune 11y agoOnLive (now defunct), NVIDIA (ramping up), Gaikai (working with, or acquired by?, Sony) just to name a couple. They don't give you your own VM to host and manage, they're subscription game streaming services, but it's the SaaS version of this.
- comex 11y agoAcquired by Sony, and the source for the Playstation Now service released earlier this year, which lets you stream PS3 games to a few devices http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/01/playstation-now-review-sony-finally-proves-streaming-gaming-is-viable/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/01/playstation-now-review... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hands-on-with-playstation-now-on-a-samsung-smart-tv/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hands-on-with-playstat...
- 11y ago
- rroriz 11y agoAmazing idea! If this could be set up for a multiplayer games without much trouble (lag, cheating, licenses), this could be The Next Big Thing :)
- kordless 11y agoI call tell you do marketing for a living.
- zachlatta 11y agoBig fan of this approach. I wrote a simple script (https://github.com/zachlatta/dotfiles/blob/master/local/bin/streamctl https://github.com/zachlatta/dotfiles/blob/master/local/bin/...) to really easily spin up and down the machine I set up for game streaming.
- dogas 11y agoWhat is the latency of a setup like this? Could I play an intensive FPS and be competitve?
- daeken 11y agoFrom a pure network connectivity standpoint, you're essentially looking at a bare minimum of ~two frames of latency (about 30-40ms), ignoring additional latency added by video compression/decompression. So, probably not going to be useful for competitive FPS play, but for most games it'd be tolerable, if even noticeable.
- philtar 11y agoNo. The latency isn't just in the game like if you connect to a high ping server, there will also be some delay from when you move your mouse to when the screen changes. This is one of the reasons competitive fighting game players say never practice online. You're gaining useless muscle memory.
- callum85 11y agoClick the button on this page and it will tell you the latency to every AWS datacenter: http://www.cloudping.info/ http://www.cloudping.info/ For me (London) it looks like I could get a latency of 28ms if I hosted my rig in their Dublin datacenter, which sounds OK. (But obviously this would be on top of the ping to the multiplayer host, if you're playing online.)
- lifeformed 11y agoAlso, this would be input latency, which is much more significant of a drawback than normal in-game network latency.
- scott_karana 11y agoWell, for multiplayer, at least the EC2 machine would have a reasonable ping with the other players, it would just be display/input latency.
- comex 11y ago
- mullen 11y agoThis is actually a cost savings. Windows games are much cheaper than their OSX versions and they are available much sooner on Windows than OSX.
- Wilya 11y agoThe guide advocates an EC2 security group that allows everything, plus disabling the Windows firewall. That's quite insecure, and unnecessary. It's probably better, and not more work, to create a security group that only allows: * UDP on port 1194 (Openvpn server) * TCP on port 3389 (Remote Desktop) * ICMP (for ping)
- micro-ram 11y agoIs Openvpn even necessary? Open 3389 to only your IP address in the security group.
- orik 11y agoyou're not playing over rdp; that would be terrible. you're using steam in-home streaming through the vpn.
- davb 11y agoYeah, using OpenVPN allows your client and server to reside on the same subnet, which I presume is necessary for Steam In-Home Streaming.
- jmiwhite 11y agoFor this setup, yes - a VPN is necessary to use Steam's inbuilt streaming feature.
- halotrope 11y agoYou need the openVPN for the Steam IHS Lan discovery and upd streaming. With my setup I still use Hamachi which also does the job and was much easier to configure. Downside is that it is proprietary and has phases with extreme paket loss which make playing impossible every now and then.
- tedchs 11y agoThe idea is OpenVPN enables IP multicast to be tunneled over the public Interent, which Steam's streaming requires.
- lnanek2 11y ago
- halotrope 11y agoI have followed the original instructions and after a couple days of tinkering around it is now my go-to service for gaming. I can play AAA titles on my mac without having them consume precious SSD space nor does the computer get anywhere as hot as when I was running them in bootcamp. The cost is quite affordable when making your own AMI with Steam and everything preinstalled. Since booting the machine and setting everything up takes around 10 minutes I also don't get tempted to play when I would have to work. It is a much more conscious decision. I only had to get an ethernet cable because wifi was too flaky. But now it is very solid with a 50M DSL line and average ping of 60ms to Ireland.
- octaveguin 11y agoI, too, followed the original instructions and played the Witcher 3 and Ark: Survival Evolved via my mac against an AWS instance on the frankfurt datacenter. This was in Vienna which means that the average ping was around 40ms. It was a fun little project to get it all working and it was playable but barely. The added latency makes you feel a little floaty (like a bad VR experience - the kind that make you sick). The witcher looked good when you stood still but not while moving. Ark's performance was abysmal on the aws hardware such that I had to turn down the settings. Part of the bad experience is likely my ISP's fault - I had spikes of packet loss - though I think this is fairly typical. The cost is mostly not in the spot instance (that /is/ cheap) but in the storage (EBS) that you need to keep around to mount a spot instance whenever you want to play. The bandwidth cost is non-trivial for the amount of data you're streaming. I had about a 40 euro bill for the month under somewhat light use. In the end, I can't say I recommend it. Onlive and Gaikai didn't do so well. That might have been their business models but I believe the tech is equally to blame. It's a ridiculously hard thing to get right consistently.
- halotrope 11y agoOh, great news. When I checked the last time there where no instances in Frankfurt. You of course have to use spot instances as well.
- surge 11y agoI used OnLive, the latency in response, even if its good for a while isn't consistent enough, even on a good connection, for playing anything other than Lego Star Wars or turn based games without screaming in frustration. You'll be met with sudden input delays or shuttering that just screws you.
- philtar 11y agoAnyone wanna team up and build something like this?
- sandis 11y agoI'd like to chat about it. I've been looking for a service like that and have tried the AWS GPU instance approach as well. My email is on my profile.
- Flammy 11y agoPotentially. I assume you already know of OnLive? Email is in profile - I think it is visible? If not reply.
- xhrpost 11y agoWhat are you thinking about building? E-mail in profile.
- kzhaouva 11y ago
- zubspace 11y agoDoes someone have experience hosting a dedicated server on EC2 24/7? How's the performance and is it cost effective? Or is it preferable to host on digital ocean/linode?
- rb2k_ 11y agoAt my current employer, we run about 10k+ EC2 instances 24/7. DO / Linode will mostly be cheaper and proooobably offer a better price/performance ratio. You will however get a lot less options (especially GPU wise)
- kuschku 11y agoIf you want to get a lot of power, especially for gaming, you can forget DO. Let’s take your average (okay, this is really beefy, but I couldn't find something lower at most dedicated hosters) gaming system: 8 Cores (16 Threads), 32GB RAM, 2TB HDD. At Digital Ocean, you pay approx. 320$/month for 12 Cores, 32GB RAM, and 320GB SSD Let’s take your average small hoster, in this case Hetzner, as comparison: You pay 55$/month (plus 55$ setup) for 8 cores (16 Threads), 32GB RAM and 2TB HDD. I’m just showing this as example: Using Cloud hosters for stuff that is running 24/7 is not cost effective, especially if you always need the same performance – use a dedicated server instead, hosters that specialize on that can provide far better offers.
- Namrog84 11y agoI think your thoughts on average gaming system are skewed
- kuschku 11y agoWell, it’s the cheapest dedicated server that Hetzner and OVH provide, so I used it for comparison, and a lot of people have similar specs nowadays.
- Diamons 11y agoWhat games are you playing that need 32GB of RAM?
- lectrick 11y agoSomewhere, someone at Valve is noticing this and pitching it around as a new service idea :O
- bsharitt 11y agoI'm going to set this up to see how it compares to my Windows Steam on Wine that sits next to my native Steam on Linux with its smaller library.
- skellington 11y agoJust curious how he got $0.11/hr for a "spot" instance of g2.2xlarge? Amazon's "on demand" pricing of that config w/ Windows on their website is $0.767/hr.
- abtinf 11y agoOn-demand and spot prices are two different things. Keep looking at the pricing page and you will see. Spot prices fluctuate constantly and your instance is auto-killed when the spot prices rises above the maximum price you are willing to pay.
- skellington 11y agoThanks, I wasn't aware of the spot pricing (never scrolled that far down the very long pricing page :) I'm not sure that I understand the economics of the spot option from Amazon's POV since it seems that a person who needed persistent servers could set their spot max price at the same price as an on-demand instance and always be ahead by doing it that way (with the caveat that there would be a short interruption if forced to switch to on-demand). For someone who needs cheapest possible compute power with a flexible schedule, spot arbitrage makes sense of course.
- jon-wood 11y agoIf you need steady state you'll almost always be better off paying for reserved instances rather than a near hourly rate spot price.
- wxs 11y ago> it seems that a person who needed persistent servers could set their spot max price at the same price as an on-demand instance and always be ahead by doing it that way Not if you need persistence: the spot price can go above the on-demand price. So if you set your max spot price to the on-demand price your instance might get terminated.
- hexedpackets 11y ago> set their spot max price at the same price as an on-demand instance People have played that game before and lost. Spot pricing can and has gone above the on-demand prices. It is normally a great way to save money, but there's no way to avoid the possibility of having your instance terminated. If that's not something you've built around then you have to stick to on-demand (or reserved).
- thedaemon 11y agoHas anyone tried this with Nvidia GeForce Experience and a Shield TV? I might try this instead of upgrading my aging desktop.
- jcastro 11y agoThe ShieldTV comes with Nvidia GRID, which is basically the same idea, a big instance on AWS with a GTX980 streamed to the device, it works surprisingly well.
- z3t4 11y agoWe might just have seen the future of PC gaming DRM. That you will pay per hour instead of a one-off payment. There's one problem though, and it's latency, even 50ms will feel very laggy. We need more decentralized data centers! With a data-center in each city you could get latency down to less then a millisecond. I think the next digital revolution will be low latency, and a flora of new services coming with it.
- halotrope 11y agoFrom first hand experience I have to say even 120ms is fine when you are not playing competitively.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 11y ago> 120ms = 8 FPS Latency isn't FPS. You can have 120ms latency and 120 FPS; frame-rate and lag are orthogonal.
- patrickmclaren 11y agoLatency will only be an issue if it's non-constant - most gamers can adjust for lag if it's expected. I think the underlying idea here is consistency. If I point and click on something that was merely a "mirage" due to network effects, then this is somewhat of a bad experience.
- jMyles 11y agoNo they aren't. If you have a general latency of 120ms, then the maximum number of frames per second which react to distinct instances of input is 8.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> If you have a general latency of 120ms, then the maximum number of frames per second which react to distinct instances of input is 8. If you have a round trip latency of 120ms, then the maximum number of action-result-reaction cycles per second is 8, but its possible to have distinct instances of input to information received each frame whether or not that frame accounts for input in the previous frame. You can have distinct instance of input -- and frames that react to them -- as fast as you can show frames and humans can process them. The frames showing the reaction will be delayed by the latency + human response time from the information they react to, but the frequency of those frames is pretty much unconstrained by latency. Which is why, again, slow frame-rate and high latency are orthogonal (both create the perception of "slowness", but they are different and independent effects.) The only real relation is that a low frame-rate can mask high-latency, as if the latency (including human response time) is less than time between frames, the latency becomes imperceptible. So, yeah, 8 FPS becomes the frame rate necessary to completely mask 120ms latency.
- Arelius 11y agoSomething that I'm a bit worried about, I used to try to run performance sensitive game servers on a Xen based virtual machine, was that no matter how many resources I tried to dedicate to the virtual machine. The xen scheduler would give hitchy performance. introducing large enough delays sporadically to make playing the game a little painful. Does anybody know much about the EC2 hyper-visor schedulers or in the case of large instances, does it even run with a serious hypervisor?
- lucaspiller 11y agoI'm not sure about specifics of shared machines, but when creating an instance there is an option to run on single-tenant hardware (obviously at a higher cost).
- Procrastes 11y agoThis can work very well for some applications. I have a startup doing something similar to this with the Second Life Viewer with good results. The most painful parts turn out to be in the plumbing around state and change management as you might expect.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoCool experiment. I thought about trying this for streaming video or music to cheap devices in various places as well. For now, I just use my smartphone and WiFi as it's cheaper. :)
- glogla 11y agoIt seems that the reason why this makes sense is Spot instance pricing - it wouldn't be economical with normal instance. But don't they pull the instance out from under you if someone outbids you? Does anyone have experience with that? And one more question - how is the performance? The OP shows screenshot of game running in 1280*800, but that might be because of the macbook resolution. Can it do fullhd or 4k?
- annon 11y agoThis would work fantastic with Steam Link that they have coming out: http://store.steampowered.com/universe/link http://store.steampowered.com/universe/link It uses the same in home streaming feature of steam.
- packetslave 11y agoI was thinking the same, but you'd have to figure out how to create the VPN to the EC2 instance for multicast forwarding, since presumably the Steam Link won't be able to run OpenVPN.
- Nexxxeh 11y agoAdd another piece of hardware. Cheap off-the-shelf Linux-running hardware. A rebadged Netgear router that'll run OpenWRT is £7. Worst case, Raspberry Pi is £45 including case, cheap small SD card, PSU and an extra USB Ethernet adapter.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TD-Linux 11y agoI wonder how the hardware encoders and decoders compare to software implementations. They of course use less CPU, but also generally tend to compress worse and have higher latencies than software implementations. Is nVidia's hardware specially optimized for this use case?
- spydum 11y agoi hate to admit, there are a lot of places I thought cloud services could be leveraged, this just wasn't one of them (keep in mind, I say useful, not necessarily best fit). This is such a cool idea, makes me realize what other creative solutions are just lurking, ready to slap me across the face.
- xhrpost 11y agoThis is crazy awesome. Since it uses h264, I wonder how well a Raspberry Pi would work as a client machine. Heck, you might be able to do a whole LAN party just with PI's.
- randunel 11y agoImagine the bandwidth required to stream a lan party :)
- xhrpost 11y agoI thought of that, but it would be downstream intensive, so even at 5Mbps for HD, you could still get at least 4 people working on a simple 20 meg line.
- moron4hire 11y agoRPi is bound at the network interface, then. Even the onboard Ethernet runs over the USB hub.
- mo1ok 11y agoThis is really important as virtual reality begins to take center stage, but most people don't have the rigs to run it.
- davesque 11y agoI'm pretty sure the latency would make VR headsets unusable with this setup.
- intrasight 11y agoIn the VR context, latency is just a bandwidth problem (think instruction look-ahead), and bandwidth keeps increasing.
- davesque 11y agoThe context isn't just VR. It's the internet. Probably the best ping you can expect to get from an aws data center (for most people) is around 30ms or 40ms. You probably only get 20ms if you're lucky. According to John Carmack, the maximum acceptable latency for a VR system is 20ms.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rl3 11y agoOne of the more exciting possibilities afforded by DIY cloud game streaming is the ability to interactively share single-player gaming experiences with people, in games that otherwise do not support co-op. Games like FTL and XCOM: Enemy Unknown come to mind. However, one thing I would be extremely wary of is running your Steam account from AWS or any other server environment. The last thing you want is to get flagged as a bot or VPN abuser and banned; Valve customer support isn't exactly known for being particularly understanding or responsive. Personally I would just load up a throwaway Steam account with a few games and use that.
- neckro23 11y agoNo need to DIY -- Steam already has game streaming built-in, so your friends can watch you play if they want. It works pretty well. This is separate from the Home Streaming feature, which is what's used/abused in the article. Home Streaming also works really surprisingly well, although it feels weird to play GPU-heavy games like Shadow of Mordor on my dinky little Macbook. With an XBox controller, no less. (I have the "unofficial" Mac drivers installed, but I'm not sure if Steam uses that or has its own XB360 controller support built-in.)
- rl3 11y agoI'm talking interactive streaming, where your friends control the game with you, over the internet. For example, you could all share turns with each person taking control of the cursor at the appropriate time. Steam's inbuilt streaming is fantastic for spectator use, it's just not interactive.
- bentcorner 11y ago> The last thing you want is to get flagged as a bot or VPN abuser and banned; Valve customer support isn't exactly known for being particularly understanding or responsive. Personally I would just load up a throwaway Steam account with a few games and use that. I wonder if you could set up the tunnel going the other way so that the EC2 instance goes through your home network to access the internet?
- kayoone 11y agowe really need a focus on low latency instead of bandwidth but i guess that's even worse in terms of marketing than upload bandwidth. But its frustrating to know that <10ms latencys are easily achievable with current technology but ISPs just don't care. Lower latency even improves web browsing a ton, voice/video calls and any kind of realtime interaction basically. Then again with 4K gaming becoming more popular, even todays bandwidth will not be enough.
- apapli 11y agoI'm not the biggest fan of ISPs but that comment isn't entirely fair on them. In Australia the speed of light actually matters for the distances light needs to travel - this is probably the same for mid-west towns not near an AWS centre too (not sure of their presence there, but I expect they are predominately on the coasts). The speed of light is 300,000 kms per second. Distance wise: Perth to Sydney approx 4,000kms or 13ms travel time, and Brisbane to Sydney approx 1,000kms or 3ms travel time. I'd say it is highly doubtful to get sub 10ms from Brisbane to Sydney if you're going via even just a handful of routers. And Perth to Sydney? Forget it!
- burke 11y agoI'm ~2 light-ms from us-east-1, and my latency is 49ms. My latency is 11 times what it would be if there were a direct fiber run from my laptop to us-east-1.
- leni536 11y agoJust for nitpicking, light doesn't travel the same speed in fiber as in vacuum. AFAIK the refraction index of the core is typically ~1.45 so your latency is "only" around 8 times larger than the theoretical limit.
- wtallis 11y agoIf you want to be fair to ISPs, don't look at cases where they fail to do the impossible or very hard, look at cases where they fail to do the very easy. The standard deviation of any ping test I do is at least 3ms due to how DOCSIS works, and I can't ping my next door neighbor (same ISP) through the internet in under 16ms. I've done traceroutes against several servers that are in the same city as I am in North Carolina and the only one where my traffic didn't first go to Atlanta or DC (or both) was to a server hosted by an ISP that has no physical presence outside of North Carolina. My cable modem and my ISP's CMTS each have out of control bufferbloat that adds hundreds of milliseconds of latency under load in each direction, which can't be entirely mitigated by my router's traffic shaping and AQM. There's little reason to believe that they've got got any AQM further upstream given the large latency spikes I see even when my last-mile link is quiet. Disregard for latency is pervasive in the design of the ISP's network.
- pdeva1 11y agoi tried using the prebuilt ami. However after installing and configuring tunnelblick on my mac, when i connect to the vpn, i get: "This computer's apparent public IP address was not different after connecting to <<hostname>>'. now steam cannot detect the windows server. what am i doing wrong?
- nicksergeant 11y agoI ran into the same thing. Not sure how to fix.
- packetslave 11y agoYou can ignore that error message (or disable IP addressing checking). The OpenVPN connection isn't configured to forward all traffic over the VPN, so your public IP won't change.
- nicksergeant 11y agoAh, okay. Strange though, Steam client won't recognize the server even when connected. Thought maybe the IP address error was the problem.
- packetslave 11y agodouble-check the OpenVPN log after you connect to the server. I had to add a flag to tshark in the provided up.sh script to make multicast forward properly.
- nicksergeant 11y agoWould you be willing to post your modified up.sh script here, or somewhere? Would love to see what you did to get it to work (still no luck on my end).
- nicksergeant 11y agoAh, my issue was I didn't have Wireshark installed, so tshark was not found.
- dharma1 11y agoi did this about a year ago to run 3dsmax/vray on ec2 gpu instance via RDP. Worked ok-ish but i found it quite clunky to mess about with AWS interface to start and turn off an instance every time I wanted to use it. Has anyone managed to script something where you just press a button/run a local script and it does all the work, including saving your image to EBS before you turn the thing off and stop paying for the instance?
- MrException 11y agoI believe that is exactly what he does in the article.
- jordanlev 11y agoSo you can install MS Windows on an EC2 instance without having to pay for a license? How does that work?
- callumjones 11y agoThe Windows license is factored into the hourly billing.
- cschep 11y agoAmazon is paying for it and it is reflected in the price you pay. Windows machines are more expensive to spin up than Linux machines.
- dsmithatx 11y agoI read the entire thing and I think it is cool that now days this is possible. However, I got to thinking at $.50+ per hour, if I play 6 hours a night, that's $3.00 a day on weeknights. If I only play $8 on weekends it adds up to $23 per week. This would equate to $1196 per year at (23*52). Basically I'd much rather invest in a gaming rig. My CPU and GPU haven't required upgrades now for years in this day in age. At least if I invest in a gaming rig I actually have a gaming rig. While I respect and find the technology fascinating and cool, it feels like leasing a car I'll never own versus owning and evening buying a new one every few years at a much lower price. For those who game a few hours a week however, I can see this being a cheap alternative to a gaming rig.
- jaimeyap 11y ago6 hours a night on weeknights sounds like a heck of a lot! Owning might make sense for you, but you might be an outlier. I would have to think most people with a job and family might struggle to find 3-4 hours a week to game. No offense intended by the above. I'm quite envious :).
- jon-wood 11y agoBack in the day I would have been in the same place as you, but since our first son arrived I'm down to far less gaming time - at the moment I'm lucky to get six hours a week, at which point this becomes far more appealing.
- marincounty 11y agoPersonally, I just don't like paying for something else monthly, or hourly. Even if it's a slightly better deal; I just don't want the hassle of another monthly bill-- looking for errors, new fees, the date the good deal goes away, the trust I hand over when giving out my credit/debit card. I know it doesn't make logical sense. As to a gaming computer, I would rather spend a couple of grand upfront, and know I can patch it together for the next few years. Same with an automobile, I don't mind driving an older car.(my current car is a POS to some individuals, but it's never seen a mechanic, it's safe, and it gets me where I need to go. I do need to thank the engineers at Toyoya though. They made some pretty indestructible automobiles.) Sometimes, I think about that quote in that movie Office Space, when Peter Gibbons said, "You know, I've never really liked paying bills."
- sunsu 11y agoDoes Google Compute Engine have the instances needed for this as well? Their datacenter is centrally located, so long times are much faster for me than east or west coast.
- packetslave 11y agoGCE doesn't (yet) offer instances with GPUs, so no.
- lewisl9029 11y agoHas anyone tried SoftEther VPN in place of OpenVPN for something like this? http://www.softether.org/ http://www.softether.org/ I've been using it to set up a site-to-site VPN between my home network and my Azure VMs and in my experiences the performance has been quite good. They also claim to have higher max throughput than OpenVPN but I haven't yet verified those claims myself.
- sengork 11y agog2.steam instance type please.
- ris 11y agoI think we have a new winner for the stupid and inefficient ways humanity is going to start using its precious infrastructure and resources. Previous holder of the title was spending terawatts of power bitcoin mining.
- le_meta 11y agoBut think of all the money
- pepijndevos 11y agoHow does the AMI handle the certificates? It seems like everyone would use the same cert and thus log on to any instance of the AMI.
- pjar 11y agoAm I the only getting stuck on OpenVPN instructions? Are they copy-paste easy or need some know-how? All I get is errors about can't open /etc/ssl/openssl.conf and list from --help command saying that -config is unknown option. Build-dh hungs
- meepster 11y agoNope, same issue here. Started from scratch twice and build-dh is still hanging. Also getting the warnings about /etc/ssl/openssl.conf... Anyone know whats up?
- Tehnix 11y agoFor some reson I haven't been able to get it to another resolution than 1024x768. Anyone else having luck on this? Else I would say that it runs super well! The input lat is ~15ms, ping is ~30ms and display lat is ~30ms, reported from the steam client. I have no trouble whatsoever playing FPS games at all, or any other game for that matter.
- beagle3 11y agoAnyone know what protocol (RDP, VNC, h264, ???) is underlying the Steam remote display?