CloudRim

GitRepo

CloudRiim is a little game I came up with to help people understand high-volume load and scaling techniques in AWS.

The idea here is that I launch a "Battle Theater" into an AWS region, let's say us-east-1 for example.  The BT is basically a MongoDB sharding rig with automatic sharding in place.  When the battle begins I will announce "The Kaiju have landed in USEast!!" and the battle will begin.

Most games are centered around the idea of keeping people off the server and doing as much local caching as possible.  This is not that by a good long shot.  The idea of this game is to pound the absolute shit out of the server as hard and as fast as you can.  In fact, simply using ab or a script with some treading junk won't be enough.  Even running jmeter on a single box won't be enough.

The goal of this game is to destroy all Kaiju in existence, but the Rift keeps spawning new Kaiju at a fairly high rate.  The Jaegers are also spawned at a similar rate.

There are two winning scenarios in the game: either the Kaiju win and you suck, or the Apocalypse is canceled and the hero's win.

Every time you do battle with the server you are awarded a random number of XP between 1 and 10, so in order to be at the top of the charts you have to do as many battles as possible.

Now here's the catch, this entire game is built around this idea that great automation can do amazing things.  In order to prove this the BT is only deployed for an hour.  This means that you have less than an hour to spin up your nodes and attack the server as hard and as fast you possibly can.  Obviously this is going to require coordination on your part.

At the end of the game the scores are tallied up and the person at the top of the score chart is given the metal of honor or something.

The idea here is to give people a fun, engaging way of learning how automation works and why it's important.  It's also a great way to prove just how unbelievably awesome AWS really is.