server-survival

Server Survival

Server Survival is an interactive 3D simulation game where you play as a Cloud Architect. Your mission is to build and scale a resilient cloud infrastructure to handle increasing traffic loads while fighting off DDoS attacks, managing your budget, and keeping your services healthy.

Learn cloud by playing:

New: Datacenter Survival — the sister game. This one teaches the logical layer of the cloud; that one teaches the physical layer it runs on: power chains, heat, cooling, PUE. Play it here.

Game Modes

• Survival — the core experience: survive as long as possible against escalating traffic, DDoS spikes, random events, and service degradation.
• Campaign — 25 hand-crafted levels across 5 chapters (Basics → Optimization → Defense & Mastery → Production Readiness → The AI Wave). Each level teaches one architecture concept with pre-built diagrams, objectives, and a debrief.
• Sandbox — a free-play lab: any budget, any traffic mix, no game over. Experiment with all 26 services.

What It Teaches

Every mechanic is a real cloud concept in miniature:

• Observability — place a Monitoring node to unlock a live metrics dashboard (RPS, error rate, latency sparklines) and alerts. Level 15 makes you fly blind without it first.
• Auto-scaling & cold start — Compute fleets scale out at 70% utilization and back in at 30%, but new instances need warmup time (Containers even more so).
• Queue-depth scaling — a queue-fed fleet scales on queue pressure, not just CPU, so backlogs trigger scale-out.
• Circuit breaking & retries — overloaded downstreams trip a breaker (50% error rate over a rolling window), traffic is retried with backoff, and SPOFs get flagged.
• Multi-region failover — GeoDNS splits traffic across regional stacks; region-outage events show why one region is never enough.
• Inference serving & batching — the GPU Cluster batches INFERENCE requests (up to 8/12/16 by tier) into one job that amortizes a fixed per-batch cost, so profit is all utilization: a full batch prints money, a half-fed GPU bleeds its $60/min upkeep.
• Model cold starts & quality — a GPU loads its model for 12/20/30s before serving anything, and every tier upgrade reloads it; bigger models also answer better (10% → 4% → 1% bad-answer risk, −0.5 reputation per bad answer).
• Inference SLOs — the Inference Gateway buffers for warming or busy GPUs but expires anything older than its 6s deadline: a stale generation is failed honestly, never served.
• Power as the constraint — the grid carries 8 kW, every GPU draws 6, and a Substation adds 6: the fleet's ceiling is bought in watts before it is bought in dollars.
• OLTP vs OLAP — the Data Warehouse takes analytics writes cheaply but refuses realtime reads; the Relational DB does the opposite trade.
• Failure-reason badges — every dropped request pops a badge on the node that dropped it, saying why (no route, capacity, read-only replica, search-only index...).

How to Play

Objective

Survive as long as possible! Manage your Budget ($), Reputation (%), and Service Health.

• Earn Money by successfully processing legitimate traffic requests.
• Lose Reputation if requests fail or if malicious traffic slips through.
• Maintain Health - Services degrade under load and need repairs.
• Game Over if Reputation hits 0% or you go bankrupt ($-1000).

Traffic Types

Traffic	Color	Destination	Reward	Description
STATIC	Green	CDN / Storage	$0.50	Static file requests (images, CSS, JS)
READ	Blue	Replica / NoSQL / SQL DB	$0.80	Database read operations
WRITE	Orange	NoSQL / SQL DB / Warehouse	$1.20	Database write operations
UPLOAD	Yellow	Storage / Warehouse	$1.50	File uploads
SEARCH	Cyan	Search Engine / SQL DB	$1.20	Search queries (Search Engine preferred, SQL DB fallback)
MALICIOUS	Red	Blocked by Firewall / Identity Provider	$0	DDoS attacks — block them or bleed reputation!
INFERENCE	Fuchsia	GPU Cluster (via Inference Gateway)	$0.50	AI generation requests — batched on GPUs, with per-request generation length

Infrastructure & Services

Build your architecture using the toolbar. All 26 services are organized into five category tabs — the same taxonomy as the table below. Each service has a cost, capacity, and per-minute upkeep:

Category	Service	Cost	Capacity	Upkeep	Role
Front door	GeoDNS	$50	60	$4/min	Front door for the whole site: splits traffic across independent regional stacks.
Front door	CDN	$60	50	$5/min	Caches STATIC content at the edge (95% hit rate).
Front door	Firewall	$40	30	$4/min	The first line of defense. Blocks malicious traffic.
Front door	Identity Provider	$55	20	$6/min	Adds latency but catches session-based attacks a WAF misses.
Front door	API Gateway	$70	60	$8/min	Rate limits traffic. Throttled requests lose less reputation than failures. Upgradeable T1–T3.
Front door	Load Balancer	$50	20	$6/min	Distributes traffic to multiple Compute instances.
Compute	Compute	$60	4	$12/min	Processes requests. Auto-scales into a fleet (with cold start). Upgradeable T1–T3.
Compute	Serverless Function	$45	30	$2/min + $0.03/req	Auto-scales with traffic. Very low upkeep but pays per completed request — cheap when idle, expensive at high RPS.
Compute	Container Cluster	$120	12	$16/min	Dense fixed capacity at a flat fee. Slow node-pool warmup on scale-out.
Compute	GPU Cluster	$300	8	$60/min	Batches INFERENCE into one amortized job. Model cold-starts on placement and on every tier upgrade; draws 6 kW. Upgradeable T1–T3.
Compute	Inference Gateway	$70	10 (queue 20)	$5/min	Holds INFERENCE for warming/full GPUs, dispatches to the least-loaded one — and expires anything older than its 6s deadline.
Data	Relational DB	$150	8	$24/min	Destination for READ/WRITE/SEARCH traffic. Upgradeable T1–T3.
Data	NoSQL DB	$80	15	$14/min	Fast for READ/WRITE, but cannot handle SEARCH queries. Upgradeable T1–T3.
Data	Memory Cache	$60	30	$8/min	Caches responses to reduce DB load. Upgradeable T1–T3.
Data	File Storage	$25	25	$5/min	Destination for STATIC/UPLOAD traffic.
Data	Search Engine	$120	12	$16/min	Specialized for SEARCH queries. 3× faster than SQL DB. Upgradeable T1–T3.
Data	Read Replica	$100	12	$12/min	Offloads READ traffic from the master DB. Requires connection to a DB. Upgradeable T1–T3.
Data	Data Warehouse	$90	40	$8/min	Stores analytics WRITEs cheaply and slowly. Cannot serve realtime READ.
Async	Message Queue	$45	50 (queue 200)	$3/min	Buffers requests during spikes. Prevents drops.
Async	Pub/Sub Topic	$65	30	$6/min	Fan-out: one event becomes one delivery per subscriber.
Async	Stream	$90	40 (queue 200)	$10/min	High throughput, strictly ordered per partition. A stalled partition backs up its tail.
Async	Dead-Letter Queue	$55	25	$4/min	Parks requests that finally failed, draining them back for a cost.
Async	Scheduler	$50	1	$5/min	Injects its own scheduled batch-job bursts on a timer.
Async	Notification	$40	20	$4/min	Terminal "send": success earns reputation, failures are silent.
Ops	Monitoring	$75	1	$8/min	Unlocks the live metrics dashboard and alerts.
Ops	Substation	$150	1	$8/min	+6 kW of grid capacity on the 8 kW base. GPUs draw 6 kW each and cannot be placed past the cap.

Scoring & Economy

Action	Money	Score	Reputation
Static Request	+$0.50	+3	+0.1
DB Read	+$0.80	+5	+0.1
DB Write	+$1.20	+8	+0.1
File Upload	+$1.50	+10	+0.1
Search Query	+$1.20	+5	+0.1
Inference	+$0.50	+15	+0.1
GPU Bad Answer	-	-	-0.5
Cache Hit	+20% reward	-	-
Attack Blocked	-$1 (mitigation)	+10	-
Request Failed	-	-half	-1
Req. Throttled	-	-	-0.2
Attack Leaked	-$50 (breach)	-	-5

Upkeep & Cost Scaling

• Base Upkeep: Each service has per-minute upkeep costs
• Upkeep Scaling: Costs increase 1x to 2x over 10 minutes
• Repair Costs: 15% of service cost to manually repair
• Auto-Repair: +10% upkeep overhead when enabled

Survival Mode

The core experience - survive as long as possible against escalating traffic with constant intervention required:

• RPS Acceleration - Traffic multiplies at time milestones (×1.3 at 1min → ×4.0 at 10min)
• Random Events - Cost spikes, capacity drops, traffic bursts, service outages every 15-45 seconds
• Traffic Shifts - Traffic patterns change every 40 seconds
• DDoS Spikes - 50% malicious traffic waves every 45 seconds
• Service Degradation - Services lose health under load, require repairs
• Health bars, event indicator, finances panel, auto-repair toggle, game-over analysis

Campaign Mode

25 levels across 5 chapters, each one a scenario built around a single lesson:

1. Basics (levels 1-3) — your first server, storage, and edge caching with a CDN.
2. Optimization (levels 4-10) — caching, queues, read scaling, search, NoSQL, rate limiting, serverless vs compute.
3. Defense & Mastery (levels 11-14) — defense in depth, high availability, cost crunches, and Black Friday.
4. Production Readiness (levels 15-20) — observability, auto-scaling, node failures, dead-letter queues, fan-out, and two-region failover.
5. The AI Wave (levels 21-25) — GPU inference: model cold starts, batch-fill economics, SLO deadlines, the power wall, and a capstone that has to end in the bla