SYSDESIGN OPS - Free System Design Game

How to play

Keep the app alive

Take the job. You are the architect for a company whose app is about to get busy. Keep it fast, online and inside the budget.
Build. Early ranks use a panel: pick server sizes, add a load balancer, a cache and more. From Senior on you drag boxes onto a canvas and connect them.
Run traffic. Dots are requests flowing through your design. Green boxes are fine, yellow are busy, red are overloaded or dead.
Read the report. Three numbers decide it: p99 latency, availability and monthly cost.
Earn 3 stars. Cheaper passing designs earn more stars. Each hint lowers the ceiling.

From Intern to Principal Architect

Intern capacity, latency and p99, scaling up, budgets, single points of failure
SDE load balancers, caches, CDNs, health checks, rate limiting
Senior Engineer read replicas, indexes, sharding, queues, idempotency
Staff Engineer zones, regions, autoscaling, circuit breakers, retry storms
Principal Architect 8 classic cases: URL shortener, chat, payments, video, ticket booking and more

FAQ

Do I need any experience?

No. The Architecture Academy explains every part with a restaurant analogy before you build anything.

Does it help with system design interviews?

Yes. The Principal cases are the classic interview questions, and the design review compares your answer with two reference designs.

Is my progress saved?

On this device, always. Sign in to keep it across devices, join the leaderboard and earn arcade XP (up to 100 from this game). Ranks here are in-game titles, just for fun.

Can I play on a phone?

Yes, but the drag-and-drop canvas from Senior on is easier on a laptop.