Scenario Library
Resource
Provider
GCP Pub/Sub Topic Saturation
Simulate an event burst that overwhelms a GCP Pub/Sub subscription: the unacknowledged message backlog surges, subscriber VMs can't keep pace, and message delivery latency climbs well past acknowledgement deadlines triggering redelivery storms. Explore how adding more GCE subscriber instances and tuning flow-control settings restore normal throughput.
intermediate
GCP
Pub/Sub
Queue
Failure
Recovery
Backlog
Subscribers
6 resources~15 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Message Burst — overwhelm subscribers" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
Web App Autoscaling
Learn how autoscaling groups respond to traffic spikes and CPU thresholds
beginner
AWS
Autoscaling
EC2
4 resources~10 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Traffic Recovery — see scale-in" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
Event-Driven Azure Microservices
Explore an AKS-hosted microservices app that offloads read traffic to Azure Cache for Redis and fans out async work through Azure Service Bus
advanced
Azure
Kubernetes
AKS
Redis
Service Bus
Cache
Queue
5 resources~20 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Traffic Recovery — see AKS scale-in" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
OCI Web Application
Deploy a simple web application on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with load balancing
beginner
OCI
Web App
Autonomous DB
5 resources~12 min
Multi-Cloud Hybrid Architecture
Experience a hybrid architecture spanning AWS and OCI with cross-cloud connectivity
intermediate
Multi-Cloud
AWS
OCI
Hybrid
7 resources~20 min
CDN-Accelerated Web App
CloudFront sits in front of your application and caches static content at edge locations worldwide. Only cache misses and dynamic API requests reach the Application Load Balancer, reducing backend load by 60–80% during traffic spikes. EC2 handles the dynamic compute tier while RDS stores persistent data.
intermediate
AWS
CloudFront
CDN
EC2
RDS
Caching
5 resources~15 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Traffic Recovery" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
Kubernetes App on GKE
Run a containerized app on GKE Autopilot, accelerated by a Memorystore cache and buffered by Cloud Pub/Sub for async processing
intermediate
GCP
Kubernetes
GKE
Redis
Pub/Sub
Cache
Queue
5 resources~18 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Traffic Recovery — see GKE scale-in" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
Azure Service Bus Queue Saturation
Simulate a burst of inbound orders that overwhelms an Azure Service Bus queue: the active message count surges past the queue's throughput unit capacity, consumer VMs fall behind, and end-to-end processing latency explodes as messages approach their lock expiry and are abandoned back to the queue. Explore how scaling out consumer instances, enabling auto-forwarding to a dead-letter queue, and upgrading to a Premium namespace restore normal throughput.
intermediate
Azure
Service Bus
Queue
Failure
Recovery
Backlog
Consumers
6 resources~15 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Order Burst — overwhelm consumers" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
DigitalOcean Starter Web App
A simple, budget-friendly web app on DigitalOcean: a Load Balancer routes visitors to a single Droplet, which stores data in a Managed PostgreSQL database. A great starting point for developers new to cloud infrastructure who want predictable, low monthly bills.
beginner
DigitalOcean
Beginner
Web App
Droplet
PostgreSQL
3 resources~10 min
Serverless API (Lambda + DynamoDB)
A fully serverless API on AWS: an Application Load Balancer triggers Lambda functions on every request — no servers to manage and you only pay per invocation. DynamoDB handles storage at any scale. Watch for cold-start latency spikes when Lambda containers are not yet warm after a period of low traffic.
intermediate
AWS
Lambda
Serverless
DynamoDB
Cold Start
3 resources~15 min
Redis Cache Crash & Recovery
Observe what happens when ElastiCache for Redis crashes mid-traffic: the cache eviction storm forces every request through to the database, connection pools saturate, and latency spikes until the cache warms back up. Explore resilience patterns like circuit breakers and staggered cache warm-up.
intermediate
AWS
Redis
Cache
Failure
Recovery
Cache Stampede
ElastiCache
5 resources~15 min
SQS Queue Backlog Saturation
Simulate a burst of inbound events that overwhelms the worker fleet: the SQS queue depth climbs into the thousands, workers fall behind, and end-to-end processing latency skyrockets. Watch how adding consumers and applying dead-letter queues restore stability.
intermediate
AWS
SQS
Queue
Failure
Recovery
Backlog
Workers
6 resources~15 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Event Burst — overwhelm workers" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
Database Failover
Watch a live Multi-AZ failover unfold step by step. Traffic ramps across two app servers behind an ALB, pushing connection pressure on RDS Primary until it overloads at step 15. The replica auto-promotes, latency spikes, error rates climb — then watch the system recover. A real AWS RDS Multi-AZ failure arc in under 60 steps.
intermediate
RDS
High Availability
Multi-AZ
6 resources~30 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Traffic Recovery" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS)
A container-native stack on DigitalOcean: a Load Balancer fronts a DOKS cluster that runs your app pods. A Managed Redis cache absorbs read traffic, and a Managed Kafka queue decouples background jobs from the web tier — all with zero infrastructure to patch.
intermediate
DigitalOcean
Kubernetes
DOKS
Cache
Queue
Redis
Kafka
4 resources~18 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Traffic Recovery — see DOKS scale-in" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
Microservices with Redis and SQS
See how a Redis cache and SQS message queue reduce database load and smooth out traffic spikes in a microservices architecture
intermediate
AWS
Redis
SQS
Microservices
Cache
Queue
6 resources~15 min
Starts at a healthy baseline — enable "Traffic Recovery" in the workspace to ramp up traffic.
Launch Day Spike
Simulate a Product Hunt-style launch surge on a single server. Find the exact upload concurrency where your transcoding queue backs up — before it happens in production.
beginner
single-node
launch
queue
upload
OCI
Beginner
3 resources~10 min