Scale It!

Level 1: First Deploy

Steady traffic of 80 requests a second. Two small servers can handle it.

馃挕 Press Deploy and watch the load bars. Green means the servers keep up.

Traffic
80
cap 100
Time left
20s
Spent
0
of 60
Dropped
0.0%
max 5%
Traffic forecastBurn 2/s 路 projected 40 of 60
capacity 100

Servers

s1 路 Small
OK50/s
s2 路 Small
OK50/s
Load balancer
Incident log

Nothing yet.

About Scale It!

Scale It puts you in charge of a small set of web servers. Traffic arrives and you must add or remove servers to keep up. Spend too much and you fail. Let too many requests drop and you fail too.

How to play

  1. Study the traffic forecast chart for the whole level.
  2. Add or remove servers. Small ones are cheap, and large ones hold more.
  3. Pick how requests are shared: Round Robin, Least Conn or Random.
  4. Press Deploy and watch the load bars.
  5. Keep capacity above traffic without going over the cost limit.

What it practises

This is load balancing and scaling, two jobs real engineers do for busy websites. A small server handles 50 requests per second and a large one handles 120. New servers take 3 seconds to boot, so you must plan ahead. The game has 6 levels.

Questions

What is load balancing?
It spreads incoming requests across several servers so none gets overloaded. Round Robin gives each server a turn. Least Conn picks the server with the most room.
How do you get three stars in Scale It?
Drop 1% or fewer of the requests. Also spend no more than three quarters of the cost limit.
Why did my server crash?
A server that drops requests for 3 seconds in a row crashes. Add capacity before traffic rises.

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