Uptime
You build a service. It breaks. You fix it. A game about an engineer’s job
Play in your browserArchitectureSource code
Puzzle, system design simulator · free, no install, no sign-up · MIT
About the game
A stream of users runs through pipes: thickness is volume, colour shows whether a block copes. You place servers, caches, queues and databases, bet on what breaks first and press start.
More
After the run comes a debrief: the decision with pros and cons, the request path and where it was thin. A game for anyone who wants to see what an engineer does, no coding needed.
Features
- 43 levels in five tiers: basics, load, observability, platform, architecture
- Caches, brokers, Kubernetes, sockets, certificates, VPN, multi-region and multi-cloud
- Monolith, modular monolith, splitting, distributed monolith, microservice hell, DDD and sagas
- 27 kinds of incidents: spike, zone outage, bad deploy, expired certificate, leak
- A 3-minute tutorial, a prediction before the start, a debrief after
1 more
- Daily task, survival, sandbox; Russian and English
Screenshots
Controls
- Block on the leftplace it on the board
- Dot at a block → another blockdraw a pipe
- Click a block or pipesettings
- Spacepause
- Deleteremove the selection (not while running)
- Wheel, pinchzoom
At a glance
- Length
- 2–4 minutes per level
- Languages
- Russian, English
- Platform
- browser, mouse and touch
- Code
- open, MIT; no server, no build
FAQ
Do I need to know how to code?
No: every block is explained through an everyday analogy, and you see what happens.
How close is it to reality?
The numbers are simplified, but causes and effects are real: queues, timeouts, retries, zone failures.
Do I need to install anything?
No, the game opens in the browser and works offline.