DevOps / SRE Simulator

aikafalari

About this game

DEVOPS / SRE SIMULATOR

You're a DevOps engineer at Northstar Digital Platform: five production
services, eight pipelines, a three-node container platform, and an error
budget that doesn't forgive a bad deploy. This is real software delivery
and reliability engineering with a genuine hidden system state underneath
— not a quiz with a "click to fix" button.

Every incident hides an actual root cause inside a live platform: a
production config pointing at the wrong endpoint, a deployment stuck
because the new version asks for memory no node actually has free, a
health check that fires before the service finishes starting up. You
investigate using the tools a real SRE reaches for — deployment history,
service metrics, distributed traces, node capacity, autoscaling policy —
and the numbers actually reflect what's broken.

HOW IT WORKS

• Read the ticket and the reported symptoms
• Run pipelines, inspect metrics, logs and traces to find the actual cause
• Correlate the incident with recent deployments before committing to a fix
• Choose a corrective action — the wrong one carries a real cost: an
unnecessary rollback, over-provisioned capacity that strains a shared
database, a restart that does nothing because the problem was never the
process
• Get paid based on speed, accuracy, and how many hints you needed

WHAT YOU'RE OPERATING

Run a full CI pipeline — checkout, build, test, package, integration test,
artifact publish — and watch it actually fail at the stage that's really
broken. Deploy to production and roll back cleanly when a release
regresses. Raise an autoscaling ceiling during a traffic surge without
overwhelming the database everything else depends on.

BUILD YOUR PLATFORM

Earn budget and XP for every incident you resolve. Spend it on real
reliability investment — more build runners, build caching, cluster
capacity, test coverage, a dedicated reliability sprint — and grow your
platform's DevOps maturity score from a shaky D toward an S.

WHY IT'S DIFFERENT

Most "IT simulator" games are trivia with a UI on top. This one has an
actual hidden platform state per incident. The diagnostic tools query that
state and return realistic, tool-appropriate output. If you don't
investigate properly, you won't have the evidence to make the right call —
and the game won't hand you the answer for free.

• No account, no login, no internet connection required
• Play fully offline after the first load
• Your progress is saved automatically on your device
• Full English and Turkish language support
• Mobile-first design built for one-handed play, with full keyboard and
mouse support on desktop

Built for anyone who likes systems-under-pressure puzzles — current DevOps
engineers and SREs who want something that respects the job, and newcomers
who want a genuinely hands-on way to learn how CI/CD, observability, and
SLOs actually work.

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