Case #0: AWS said it wasn't them.

5 steps, about 5 minutes. Free, and you don't need to sign up to play.

It's a Thursday evening in February and you're on call at a company that gives developers a ready-made backend. Each project gets a database, logins and file storage, and lives in one cloud region the customer picks.

A lot of those projects run in us-east-2, in Ohio. Until 21:12 tonight, it was a normal Thursday.

How it's built

A customer's app reaches its project over the internet. Each project lives in one region, inside the company's own VPCs on AWS. Traffic goes in and out through internet gateways. Some customers connect over a private link instead, VPC peering, which never touches the internet.

Before you start

VPC
A private network you rent inside a cloud provider. Your servers live in it, cut off from the internet unless you connect them.

Region
One of the cloud provider's locations, like us-east-2 in Ohio. Each is its own group of data centers, so trouble in one usually stays there.

Internet gateway
The door between a VPC and the public internet. Traffic from the internet to your servers, and back, goes through it.

What you'll practise

Reading dashboards, Explaining outages, Rollbacks, Infrastructure as code and Bulkheads & cells.

Start the case

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