I wrote this post as a guest article for Hathora, and I've released it here too as a mirror. Hathora is Redwood's official on-demand game server provider, which can greatly simplify your infrastructure and DevOps.
Without persistent data, online games would only have usernames and maybe avatars. Worlds wouldn't be able to reload after a game or OS update. Whether you're using Hathora for ephemeral matches or persistent worlds, you usually need persistent data to at least keep track of player progression and the player's appearance (but likely much more).
Since Hathora's servers are purely ephemeral [for good reason], we need to add additional components to get persistent data:
- Configuring the servers during creation to give them state
- An external place to store the data
- Methods to retrieve the data
In this post, we'll talk about the different types of persistence and how best to integrate them with Hathora's ephemeral game servers.