Dynamic Minecraft Servers

Status: Proposed
Submitted: Oct 26th, 2023

The idea

Provision minecraft servers on-demand.
Servers are expensive especially when you don't have a sustained amount of active players.
Therefore it's probably a good idea to dynamically start and provision servers that can handle minecraft servers and kill them when demand ends.

Flow

Terms:

Client: End User
Server: The provisioner
Instance: Provisioned servers

Connecting

The flow of connecting will look something like this.

Client connects to custom^[1]^ minecraft proxy.
Server checks if minecraft server exists and runs
1. Minecraft server is live: Server connects client to minecraft server.
2. Minecraft server is being created: Server waits until process finished and connects client to minecraft server.
3. Minecraft server doesn't exist
  1. Server creates new cloud instance according to config.
  2. Server waits 'till ICMP succeeds.
  3. Server ssh'es into server and starts instance according to config.
  4. Server waits 'till minecraft server starts.
  5. Server connects client to minecraft server.
Server closes connection.

Demand end

When demand ends the flow will look something like this.

Instance sends DEMAND_END to server
Server marks instance as stopping and won't connect clients to it.
The instance is stopped. (send MC_STOPPED to server)
Data is .tar.gz'd and sent to a storage medium. (sftp/cifs/...???)
Instance does post-flight checks.
1. Is all data backed up?
Instance sends EXITING
Server removes reference to instance.
Server destroys instance from hosting.

Storage

All data whould be from the IDLE state of a server.
When demand ends all data should be sent to a storage medium; compressed.
When demand starts all data should be pulled from a storage medium and decompressed.

Why is this significant?

Minecraft is a fun game, however it's trending in waves, therfore there are a lot of bursts of activity but not sustained.

Maintaining the Minecraft infrastructure can be done but it's tiresome and, maybe more importantly, dependant on humans.
People living in the US might connect when the admin is sleeping. Thus they can't play.
A simple proxy/manager can solve this.

Cost

'Tis a dynamic scaling solution, thus undeterminable.
However, should this proposal be accepted the manager should have a option to refuse creation upon reached budget.

Existing tooling

TimoCloud might be a good example of what we're trying to do.
OnDemandMinecraft does this idea with AWS but with a web-ui to start the server.
MineCloud does this idea also with AWS but MineCloud uses a discord bot to start the server.

Notes

[1]: Yet to be written/determined which.

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