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pshenok/server-survival · source
Snapshot 0 · 2026-11-04T12:47:28Z · JavaScript · MIT
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4db23795cf40b6053ea7c03796653497787388f5820872f510efd1f1618a8a60GitHub description at capture
Tower defense game that teaches cloud architecture. Build infrastructure, survive traffic, learn scaling.
README at capture
# 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: [](https://pshenok.github.io/server-survival/) > 🏭 **New: [Datacenter Survival](https://github.com/pshenok/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](https://pshenok.github.io/datacenter-survival/). ## 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 black. 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 7 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, and lets you try it out: - **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. - **Test in Sandbox** — opens your current build in Sandbox in a new tab, upgrades included, to try it under any traffic mix. Your run waits in its own tab, paused. ### 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. - **Build Tools:** `V` Select, `C` Link, `X` Demolish, `U` Unlink. Each key is shown in the corner of its button. - **Select Tool:** Click a node to see its links, outgoing in cyan and incoming in magenta. Drag it to move it. - _Several at once:_ `Shift`+click adds a node to the selection. Drag any of them to move the group, press `Delete` to remove them, or choose Link or Unlink and click a node to apply it to all of them. - **Connect Tool:** Click two nodes to create a connection (flow direction matters!). Hold `Shift` while clicking the destination to keep linking from the same source. - _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). #### On a phone or tablet - **Tap:** Works like a left click. It places the selected service, links two nodes, or demolishes and unlinks with those tools. - **One finger on a service:** Drag it to a new tile while the Select tool is active. - **Two fingers:** Drag to pan, pinch to zoom, twist to rotate (standing in for `Q`/`E`). - **HUD tabs:** On a phone-sized screen, in portrait or landscape, the panels open one at a time from the row of icons under the time controls. Tap the open one again to clear the board. The last two icons reset the camera, standing in for `R`, and switch between the isometric and top-down views, standing in for `T`. ## 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](https://threejs.org/) for 3D visualization. - **Styling:** [Tailwind CSS](https://tailwindcss.com/) for the glassmorphism UI. - **Build:** No build step required! The game is served raw from this repo by GitHub Pages. ## Getting Started **To play, click [PLAY NOW](https://pshenok.github.io/server-survival/).** No install, no build, no account. To run your own copy — a fork, or a change you just made — serve the folder instead of opening the file. The game is native ES modules, and browsers fetch module scripts in CORS mode, so a `file://` origin is blocked and double-clicking `index.html` gets you the UI shell over an empty canvas. Any static server works, and one is already on your machine: ```bash git clone https://github.com/pshenok/server-survival.git cd server-survival python3 -m http.server 8000 # then open http://localhost:8000 ``` ### Host your own copy [](https://wasmer.io/apps/create?github=pshenok%2Fserver-survival) To put a fork online, fork this repository first, then import your fork on Wasmer (in the link, swap `pshenok%2Fserver-survival` for your own `owner%2Frepo`). Importing builds from the repository you pick; it does not copy this one into your account, and only a repository you own and connect redeploys when you push. There is still no build step: Wasmer serves the folder as static files, the same way GitHub Pages does. ## For Contributors There is still **zero build step** — the dev tooling is optional and for contributors only: - Run `npm install` once, then use `npm run check` to run ESLint and the full Vitest suite. - 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](CONTRIBUTING.md) for the workflow. ## Community Join our Discord server to discuss strategies and share your high scores: [Join Discord](https://discord.gg/f38NgHDwnK) --- _Built with code and chaos._