(Initially posted here on my LinkedIn profile, but I’ve decided to move it to my blog, and tidy it up a bit.)

The idea is to use the cloud to play games (yes, I know - but this is a fun application of what could be used in the workplace professionally - it’s the fundamental skillls in cloud tech that are important here), all controlled with AWS Lambda functions, and using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to deploy the setup.

Depending on the region, these snapshots can actually be cheaper than a fully EBS-backed SSD.

By a fusion technique of associating the snapshot with an AMI and launch template, we can create snapshots when the cloud gaming VM is powered off, use AWS EventBridge to call an AWS Lambda function to asynchronously (we do this because a 512GB EBS volume can take a LONG time to create a initial snapshot, and Lambda times out after 15 minutes.

Combine that with RAM and execution time, and you’ve got a costly Lambda!) take a snapshot, which EventBridge then calls yet another Lambda function to create an AMI with the snapshot, and a Launch Template, and we then have a cloud gaming VM, ready to be deployed.