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:

Game Modes

• Survival — the core experience: survive as long as possible against escalating traffic, DDoS spikes, random events, and service degradation.
• Campaign — 20 hand-crafted levels across 4 chapters (Basics → Optimization → Defense & Mastery → Production Readiness). 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 23 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.
• 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!

Infrastructure & Services

Build your architecture using the toolbar. All 23 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.
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.

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
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

20 levels across 4 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.

Levels come with pre-built starting architectures, primary and bonus objectives, speedrun stars, and a debrief tip. Later chapters throw forced outages — including a whole region going dark — at your build.

Sandbox Mode

A fully customizable testing environment for experimenting with any architecture:

Control	Description
Budget	Set any starting budget (slider 0-10K, or type any amount)
RPS	Control traffic rate (0 = stopped, or type 100+ for stress tests)
Traffic Mix	Adjust all 6 traffic type percentages independently
Burst	Spawn instant bursts of specific traffic types
Upkeep Toggle	Enable/disable service costs
Clear All	Reset all services and restore budget

No game over in Sandbox - experiment freely!

Share Your Architecture

Built something you're proud of? The share panel exports your architecture two ways:

• PNG export — a clean image of your diagram to post anywhere.
• Shareable URL — your whole build encoded in a ?arch= link; anyone who opens it gets your architecture loaded and ready to run.

Controls

• Left Click: Select tools, place services, and connect nodes.
• Right Click + Drag: Pan the camera.
• Scroll: Zoom in and out.
• WASD / Arrows: Move camera (pan) when zoomed in.
• ESC: Open main menu and pause game. Press again or click Resume to close menu (stays paused).
• Camera Reset: Press R to reset the camera position.
• Birds-Eye View: Press T to switch between isometric and top-down view.
• Hide HUD: Press H to toggle UI panels.
• Category Tabs: The toolbar groups services into five tabs — Front Door, Compute, Data, Async, Ops. Keys 1-5 switch between them.
• Connect Tool: Click two nodes to create a connection (flow direction matters!).
  • Valid Flows: Internet -> (GeoDNS/Firewall/CDN/API Gateway) -> Load Balancer -> Queue -> Compute -> Cache -> (Search Engine/Read Replica/SQL DB/NoSQL DB/Storage)
• Delete Tool: Remove services to recover 50% of the cost.
• Time Controls: Pause, Play (1x), and Fast Forward (3x).

Strategy Tips

1. Block Attacks First: Always place a Firewall immediately connected to the Internet. Malicious leaks destroy reputation fast (-5 per leak) and cost $50 per breach.
2. Use CDN for Static Content: Connect Internet -> CDN -> Storage. The CDN handles 95% of static traffic cheaply!
3. Watch Service Health: Damaged services have reduced capacity. Click to repair or enable Auto-Repair.
4. Scale for Traffic Surges: RPS multiplies at milestones - prepare before ×2.0 at 3 minutes!
5. Balance Income vs Upkeep: Start lean, scale as income grows. Over-provisioning leads to bankruptcy.
6. Use Cache Wisely: Reduces database load significantly for READ requests.
7. Buffer with Queue: Queue helps survive traffic burst events without dropping requests — and a queue-fed Compute fleet auto-scales on queue depth.
8. React to Events: Watch the event bar - cost spikes mean hold off on purchases, traffic bursts mean ensure capacity.
9. API Gateway for Graceful Degradation: Throttled requests only lose -0.2 reputation (vs -1.0 for failures). Great for surviving traffic spikes!
10. Split DB Traffic with NoSQL: Route READ/WRITE to NoSQL (faster, cheaper) and keep the Relational DB for SEARCH queries only.
11. Search Engine for SEARCH Storms: SEARCH is the heaviest traffic type (2.5x weight). A dedicated Search Engine processes it 3x faster than SQL DB.
12. Read Replica for READ offloading: Under "API Heavy" or "Read Heavy" shifts, a Read Replica prevents your main DB from drowning in READ requests.
13. Serverless Function = pay-per-use: Great for spiky traffic, but monitor finances — per-request cost ($0.03) adds up fast at high RPS.
14. Place Monitoring early: The metrics dashboard shows error rates and latency before the failure badges start raining.
15. Read the failure badges: Every dropped request tells you why it died — the badge is the lesson.

Tech Stack

• Core: Vanilla JavaScript (native ES modules — an explicit module graph under src/, no bundler)
• Rendering: Three.js for 3D visualization.
• Styling: Tailwind CSS for the glassmorphism UI.
• Build: No build step required! The game is served raw from this repo by GitHub Pages.

Getting Started

1. Clone the repository.
2. Open index.html in your modern web browser.
3. Start building your cloud empire!

For Contributors

There is still zero build step — the dev tooling is optional and for contributors only:

• npm install once, then npm run check runs ESLint + the full Vitest suite (593 tests).
• CI runs the same check on every PR.
• The code is native ESM: game.js plus focused modules under src/ (sim/, core/, ui/, campaign/, persistence/, input/).

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the workflow.

Community

Join our Discord server to discuss strategies and share your high scores: Join Discord

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Built with code and chaos.