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Enterprise Architecture Example

Bringing together all the concepts covered—Linux optimization, Docker, Proxies, Databases, and Monitoring—this document outlines a blueprint for a professional, highly available game server architecture designed to support thousands of concurrent players.

This architecture assumes the use of multiple dedicated physical servers (Bare Metal Nodes) located in a secure data center.

The Infrastructure Blueprint​

Node 1: The Gateway (Edge Node)​

  • Hardware: Focus on network throughput and anti-DDoS capabilities. High-speed NIC (10Gbps+). CPU needs good single-thread performance but doesn't need many cores.
  • Software:
    • Nginx Reverse Proxy: Handles all HTTP/HTTPS traffic, terminates SSL, and routes to internal web APIs.
    • WaterdogPE (Proxy 1 & 2): Runs multiple instances of the proxy software to handle UDP traffic and route players to backend servers.
  • Security: Only ports 80/443 (TCP) and 19132 (UDP) are open to the public internet.

Node 2: Database and Management (State Node)​

  • Hardware: NVMe SSDs for ultra-fast I/O. Plenty of RAM.
  • Software:
    • MariaDB/MySQL: The primary relational database for persistent data.
    • Redis: In-memory cache for fast data retrieval and cross-server messaging (Pub/Sub).
    • Pterodactyl Panel: The web interface for managing the entire network.
    • Prometheus & Grafana: Centralized monitoring and alerting.
  • Security: Completely closed to the public internet (except perhaps the Panel web interface via Nginx on Node 1). Only accessible via a private Virtual LAN (VLAN).

Nodes 3, 4, 5... : The Compute Nodes (Workers)​

  • Hardware: High clock speed CPUs (e.g., Intel i9 or AMD Ryzen 9) to handle the single-threaded nature of PMMP. 64GB+ RAM.
  • Software:
    • Pterodactyl Wings Daemon: Manages the Docker containers on the node.
    • Docker: Container engine.
    • Node Exporter: For Prometheus to scrape hardware metrics.
  • Payload: These nodes run dozens of isolated Docker containers, each holding a PMMP instance (Hubs, Minigames, Factions shards).
  • Security: No public ports open. They only communicate with Node 1 (Waterdog routing traffic in) and Node 2 (saving data out) over the private VLAN.

Traffic Flow Example​

  1. A player connects to play.example.com. DNS resolves this to Node 1's public IP.
  2. The traffic hits WaterdogPE on Node 1.
  3. WaterdogPE authenticates the player and routes the UDP traffic over the internal VLAN to a Hub container running on Node 3.
  4. The player enters a command in the Hub to buy an item.
  5. The PMMP Hub container on Node 3 sends an asynchronous request over the VLAN to the MariaDB database on Node 2 to deduct coins.
  6. Simultaneously, the player visits store.example.com in their web browser.
  7. The traffic hits Nginx on Node 1, which proxies the request to the store's backend API container (wherever it is running), terminating the SSL connection.

Advantages of this Architecture​

  • Security Isolation: The databases and compute nodes are completely hidden from the public internet. A DDoS attack can only hit the Edge Node, which is specifically designed to handle it.
  • Scalability: If you need more compute power, you simply rent Node 6, install Wings, connect it to the Panel, and start deploying PMMP instances to it immediately.
  • Resilience: If a compute node (Node 4) suffers a hardware failure, you only lose the specific shards running on it. The network as a whole remains online, and Waterdog stops routing players to the dead node.

Conclusion​

Building an enterprise game network is no longer about running a single script on a VPS. It requires treating the gaming network as a complex distributed application, leveraging modern DevOps practices, containerization, and strict network segmentation.