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You inherit a product that already has users and keep it alive through ten weeks of growth. Everything you need to play is below — read it in any order.

The job

what you were handed and what winning means

You did not build this. You inherited it — a social feed called Hum with five thousand users, already live, already serving traffic. Over the next ten weeks its audience grows two-hundredfold. Your job is to keep it standing — not to rebuild it from scratch.

One product, ten weeks
The whole run is a single architecture you evolve week by week. Nothing resets between weeks; the design you leave on one week is the one that meets the next week's load.
Growth is the pressure
Users climb from ~5,000 toward the millions. Every week is heavier than the last, and a few weeks are far heavier for a few minutes — see The clock.
No blank page
You start with a working design already on the canvas. Most weeks you are adding one thing and resizing another, then shipping before the load arrives — not drawing from zero.
No answer handed over
The game states the target and never the fix. Several designs pass; the leanest one that holds wins.

You cannot pause your way to safety — the clock runs while you think. Read what's coming, act early.

simulated cost, latency and availability are deliberately simplified game physics · not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any cloud provider

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How to play — CloudSims