How it works
A full outage on a live cloud account we host. One failure opens it, more follow as you work, and it ends when everything is back to healthy. You leave with a report you can share.
One symptom, one fix, timed, with a short report. Where you learn one failure shape at a time.
A chain of failures on one account, one clock, no restart. Where you show what you can do under pressure.
01
You open the console on an account we provisioned. You get the symptom a colleague would report and the access an engineer would have. No briefing beyond that.
02
Console, logs, dashboards, configuration: the tools you use at work. Some of what you see is noise, as in production. Nothing is simulated.
03
You act on a hypothesis and press verify: the platform checks the cloud and tells you whether the fix holds. Every step is recorded, including the ones you undo.
04
In a ride, fixing one failure surfaces the next: a service buckles, an alert fires. Same account, same clock, no restart. Hints are there when you are truly stuck.
05
The platform checks that every service is healthy and writes up how you got there. As rides add up, the reports show which kinds of outage you handle well and which ones still catch you.
We host the account and set it up. You use the provider's own console and command line.
Amazon Web Services
Live
Live, with the widest catalog: all 83 public challenges run on AWS.
Microsoft Azure
Live
Live (alpha): 38 public challenges also run on Azure. It is a first set, and the catalog is still growing.
Google Cloud
Live
Live (alpha): 46 public challenges also run on Google Cloud. It is a first set, and the catalog is still growing.
Other providers
Planned
Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud and OVH are on the list and will be scoped now that Azure and Google Cloud have their first challenges.
Nine of the 83 public Shakeride challenges, from five minutes to ninety.
The web application is unreachable. The platform reports no running copies of the service, and the traffic router marks every target unhealthy. The most recent release points at a build that was never published. The expected configuration is documented on the resources themselves. Restore service.
20 min · level 3
A business workflow accepts every request and reports it as started, then fails on its first step with an access error. The queue it writes to and the worker behind it both exist and look healthy. A leftover worker from an earlier release is connected to nothing. Find what is being denied and restore the chain.
15 min · level 2
The event router reports every delivery as successful, but the messages never arrive at their destination. The routing rule and its target are intact. A second, unused destination exists nearby. Explain the gap between reported success and actual delivery, then close it.
15 min · level 2
Malformed orders disappear after a few retries instead of landing somewhere a human can review, and nobody was alerted when processing stalled. A second worker with a very short time limit also exists. Restore both containment and visibility for messages that cannot be processed.
25 min · level 3
Looking up a customer by email is slow and rejecting requests under ordinary load, while expired session records accumulate instead of being cleaned up automatically. A monitor on write capacity exists but has never fired. The expected settings are documented on the resource itself.
20 min · level 3
Traffic keeps going to the primary region even though the standby is healthy and should have taken over. Health checks and routing rules exist, but nothing shifts when the primary fails. A second, near-identical set of records exists. The operations team keeps the expected configuration on a dashboard. Restore automatic failover.
45 min · level 4
External researchers report that they can list and download files from a data store without any credentials. Public-access settings are inconsistent across the account, and a second store with a similar name exists. Identify the unintended exposure and close it.
5 min · level 1
New orders stop flowing end to end: the intake queue grows, the order count stalls, and customer notifications never fire. Several workers and tables from earlier releases are still around. Every break in the path must be found; repairing three of the four changes nothing.
90 min · level 5
Everything running in the private tier has gone quiet: it cannot reach the open network, shared storage, or the database behind it, while the public tier keeps answering normally. Connections simply never complete. Recent changes touched routing and traffic rules across several layers at once. Restore outbound reach for private workloads across every dependency they need.
90 min · level 5
Scored rides end with a report of what you fixed and how. Once you have played a few, you can request a PDF report covering them and bring it to an interview.
Nothing you break belongs to anyone else.
We host the cloud account. Nothing lands on your bill.