This experiment moves away from the common monolithic game, login, shop, and hub servers approach and steers towards a more service-oriented architecture. Load balancing will be implemented internally so that when a player makes a request to connect to a channel, the current host may choose different instances (host and port) in a round robin fashion. The only requirement is that there be one login server because the login server port is constant. Theoretically, the server should easily attain high availability and scale horizontally no matter how skewed the player distribution may be on certain channels.
To reduce memory usage, there will be be an option to run these services on a single process for low traffic servers hosted on low resource machines, although a minimal level of redundancy is preferable. The hub server will be eliminated and all communication will be peer to peer to reduce memory overhead and latency. Instead of specialized processes, all instances should be able to accept connections for the login server, game server, or shop server, though the capacity of each instance can be tuned and optimized. To reduce the overhead of context switches, much of the logic will be done in an asynchronous manner. Vert.x will be used to coordinate communication among the modular daemons and to operate the asynchronous event loop.