Accelerate Unreal Engine Development with Horde

• Horde is Epic’s native CI/CD & distributed‑build platform.
• UBA + Hathora agents cut compile times by up to 90 %.
• RUNREAL gives you a turnkey Horde cluster without the headaches.

About RUNREAL

We help Unreal Engine studios ship faster by taking DevOps off your plate. This post was written by Marwan Hilmi, cofounder at RUNREAL.

RUNREAL × Hathora: Fixing UE5 Builds Without the Pain

Shipping a game on UE5 often means battling multi‑hour compile times, brittle scripts, and a jungle of on‑prem and hybrid-cloud build servers. Horde solves this if you have the courage and a cracked devops team to deploy and maintain it. This article breaks down what Horde does, why self‑hosting is hard, and how RUNREAL × Hathora gets you a managed Horde deployment without the pain.

What is Horde?

Horde is a CI/CD orchestrator, a set of workflow services and a key ingredient of The Epic Way, Epic’s guidelines for managing Unreal Engine projects. Horde is open‑source, specialized for Unreal workflows, and proven on Fortnite since 2021, but running it at scale is non‑trivial and it covers a lot of ground:

• Automate build, test, and deploy pipelines
• Parallelize C++ and shader compiles with Unreal Build Accelerator (UBA)
• Monitor quality via test dashboards and studio‑wide analytics
• Reserve devkits through Device Manager
• Crowd‑source build health with UnrealGameSync metadata

UBA on Hathora gives you a parallelized build farm without the overhead

Whether you’re already self-hosting Horde or leveraging RUNREAL’s pain-free setup, Hathora makes it easy to scale your compute resources with containerized UBA agents (workers) in over 14 regions worldwide. Unreal + Horde already makes the process simple by breaking down each compile job, assigning tasks to each UBA agent, caching the results, and optionally tearing agents down when they’re idle. Builds finish up to 90% faster, and you only pay for the minutes you actually use.

Challenges of Self‑Hosting Horde

Operating a polyglot stack

Horde is composed of a half-dozen interconnected services: API servers, build workers, MongoDB, Redis, load balancers, object storage, and more. Deployment and configuration is challenging and managing each service is a potential outage.

Scaling build capacity

Build spikes can require hundreds of CPU cores for minutes at a time. Idle capacity burns cash; throttling kills velocity.

Security and upgrades

Managing VPNs, custom OAuth authentication, rotating secrets, patching CVEs, and tracking Unreal releases are all distractions from making games.

Turnkey Horde with RUNREAL × Hathora

Horde gives Unreal studios the same pipeline super‑powers Epic relies on, but its operational load can dwarf smaller teams. By pairing Horde with Hathora’s elastic UBA agents and RUNREAL’s managed control plane, you unlock AAA‑grade velocity with indie‑size overhead. Ship faster. Iterate more. We’ll handle Horde.

Set up your Horde Cluster on RUNREAL

• One click setup
• Managed authentication and security
• Seamless upgrades
• 24/7 Unreal Engine experts on call

Scale build agents on Hathora

• Scale your build workers with elastic UBA agents
• Usage-based pricing for cloud agents, or heavily discounted for dedicated bare-metal
• Global low‑latency regions
• Near‑linear compile speed‑ups

 Ready to Get Started?