Unicorns For Rent

Introduction

As you may have guessed, we don’t actually have unicorns for rent! Earlier this year, Kurtosys participated in an AWS Game Day event. This is an online collaborative challenge where several teams compete against each other during a fictional event (about Unicorns). We had a great day with participants from many engineering disciplines and so we wanted to share our experience for others who may be thinking of taking part in a future event.

What is AWS Game Day

AWS Game Day can be described as a gamified, team-based learning exercise hosted by AWS where team skills in implementing AWS solutions is tested in a real-world environment that is risk free, interactive and a lot of fun.

All teams are given a starting architecture that will need to evolve during the day in response to various internal and external events (think chaos monkey). Each team can choose their own path and methods they want to use based on AWS resources at their disposal.

Points are scored based on completed transactions and how quickly those transactions are completed. The faster a transaction is completed the higher the point allocation. If your environment is down or slow then point allotment or no points are allocated at all. Points are deducted when your environment costs increase above a threshold so it was very important to ensure that the solutions put in place were cost effective and yet still resilient, scalable and secure.

A live scoreboard was available to all participants showing the current ranking for each team.

Fictitious Narrative:

Congratulations on your new position at Unicorn.Rentals! We are the largest provider of mythical creatures in the world, fulfilling the needs of parents who have caved to their childrens’ demands of temporary use of a unicorn.

As part of our dominance of the Legendary Animal Rental Market (LARM), we understand the importance of our human capital and invest heavily in training programs for our growing team of technical experts. This will be a new hire orientation that you will never forget!

Getting Together

At the start of the day all teams got together in the waiting room on AWS chime. This gave all the various teams members time to chat and meet new people from the other companies. The AWS moderators joined and the teams were given information about the narrative for the day and a general idea of the day’s events, including the game dashboard. The game dashboard is the central place for all needed information. It provided all required credentials and key pairs to be able to log into the AWS console or use the CLI.

The first challenge was choosing a good team name. This was an important factor as it was put to a vote and the team with the best name received a prize.

The Kurtosys teams came up with some very original names:

· Silence of the Lambdas

· Kurtosys Glacier(s)

· Kurtosys Nullpointer Exceptions

What a bunch of jokers. With all the information presented to the teams it was time to start.

Course of the Game

In total the game ran for four hours. In the first hour the Kurtosys teams were doing well. All the environments were running on a micro EC2 instance. They were able to handle the minor issues that popped up on their various environments and Silence of the Lambdas had a good lead in the 1st position while Kurtosys Glaciers and Kurtosys Nullpointer Exceptions was fighting it out for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th positions with Electric Dragon Warriors (a team from another company).

It was in the second hour that things started to go horribly wrong. EC2 instances were deleted or shut down. Security groups was removed or changed. Networks were blocked. It was utter chaos. On top of all of that, the load to the environment increased.

During this period all the teams changed positions as they attempted to adapt to the event by identifying the problem, the most efficient solution and implementing it. Being able to observe the drama that unfolded thorugh chime and internal chat proved highly entertaining, with some teams dropping to last place and with negative scores!

The teams were struggling to get their environments stable. It was time for the teams to re-evaluate their current environment architecture and look to the future.

Kurtosys Nullpointer Exceptions split into 2 smaller teams. One team concentrated on trying to keep the current architecture up and running with the least number of points losses while the second team was working on building a new environment, opting to use AWS services like ECS and caching. This showed that the team members had to collaborate and co-ordinate to succeed.

The Kurtosys Glaciers team was still at the top position. They went the same route to build a secondary environment using AWS ECS and container services while keeping their current environment as stable as possible. To keep the environment stable the team spent a lot of time on the cost aspect and manually managed their instance uptimes while building the new environment.

Silence of the Lambdas was dropping positions slowly and they opted to keep using the current architecture (e.g., EC2 instances)…. big mistake.

The last 30 minutes of the game was very exciting. Kurtosys Glaciers and Kurtosys Nullpointer Exceptions was holding on 1st and 2nd position but the team, Shop till you DROP, was climbing very fast and their scoring trend was higher. Silence of the Lambdas were slowly losing ground against the other teams.

At this stage the two top Kurtosys teams were doing their utmost best to try and get their scoring trend higher than that of their closest rival, and each other, to ensure they keep their 1st and 2nd positions. Both the teams were implementing caching technologies and were also investigating the AWS CDN service Cloud Front.

Unfortunately, time was running out and the Kurtosys teams were not able to get that trend higher than Shop till you DROP. Kurtosys Nullpointer Exceptions was able to get their scoring trend higher than Kurtosys Glacier passing them on the leaderboard but in the last 10 minutes of the game Shop till you DROP surpassed both Kurtosys Nullpointer Exceptions and Kurtosys Glaciers.

At the end of the game Shop till you DROP took 1st position with Kurtosys Null Pointers 2nd and Kurtosys Glaciers 3rd. Silence of the Lambdas was not able to recover in time and they came in at 8th place but, as a consolation, they were voted the team with the best name.

Conclusion

This was a great day of learning and fun! The real-world scenarios and working on solutions under pressure allowed all the team members to gain useful experience and better understanding of AWS services. It was also useful for the team members to interact and get to know their fellow Kurtosys colleagues from various other engineering teams. Kurtosys is really looking forward to participating again in 2023. We may even participate in the world championship, everyone except Silence of the Lambdas that is.

By Jacobus van Heerden