The Agones project, the open source platform for scaling and orchestrating dedicated game servers on Kubernetes, celebrates its official transition to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Originally founded as a deep co-development between Google and Ubisoft in 2017, the project is now being donated by Google to the CNCF at the Sandbox level to foster a community-owned and governed future.
To further commemorate this milestone, project founder and lead maintainer Mark Mandel and Jean-François Hubert (Development Director, Ubisoft Entertainment) will deliver a joint keynote at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam. Their presentation, “How Ubisoft Orchestrates Global Multiplayer Games with Agones,” will detail Ubisoft’s journey from proprietary solutions to a cloud-agnostic standard powering massive global fleets.
Agones was designed to teach Kubernetes how to handle the unique, stateful requirements of authoritative, multiplayer game servers. Today, the project has matured into a staple of the multiplayer games industry, supported by a diverse and growing community of over 250 contributors.
“Multiplayer game server hosting used to run entirely on bespoke, proprietary systems, but open source has changed the game,” said Mark Mandel, Agones founder. “Traced from its origins at Google to its current home in the CNCF, Agones shows how a community-driven standard is now powering the biggest names in the industry.”
The project’s architecture allows developers to “build once and deploy everywhere,” scaling multiplayer experiences seamlessly across PC, console, and mobile platforms. By being truly cloud-agnostic, Agones runs across on-premises data centers and a variety of major cloud providers, giving studios absolute flexibility in how and where they host their games.
“Our collaboration on Agones since 2017 has been instrumental in our global infrastructure strategy. Its cloud-agnostic design lets us run dedicated game servers consistently across any cloud provider without changing our game server binaries or operational patterns. We continue to use Agones in some production games, where it plays an important role in running live multiplayer games at scale. Agones is a great fit for dedicated game servers because it standardizes server lifecycle management on Kubernetes and helps us scale capacity up and down reliably. It also enables reusable game server patterns, where a single server process can safely host multiple sessions over its lifetime, improving efficiency while keeping operations predictable. Ubisoft continues to support the open source community and contribute through ongoing maintainer involvement as Agones transitions to the CNCF.” – Thomas Lacroix
About Agones
Agones is an open-source platform that extends Kubernetes to orchestrate, scale, and manage the lifecycle of dedicated multiplayer game servers. By providing a common API for game server management, it enables studios to focus on game development rather than infrastructure complexity. For more information, visit agones.dev.