Cloud ArchitectureLEVEL 1: The Startup

Seed to Series A (5–20 people)

Your Role

Solo Generalist / First DevOps Hire

Team Size

5–20 engineers

Target Environment

1–3 microservices, single cloud account, rudimentary CI

Level 2 Unlock Criteria (70% Rule)

7 OF 10 + 1 BOSS REQUIRED

Solve any 7 out of the 10 incidents (including at least 1 Boss incident) to automatically unlock Level 2.

Overall Progress0 / 7 required (0/10 total)

Boss Incidents0 / 1 required

Incidents Solved:0/7 target (0%)

Boss Incidents Beaten:0/1 (Required for unlock)

Incidents & Requests (10)

Resolve ≥70% to unlock Level 2

INCIDENT #01

Multi-AZ HA Architecture: Converting Single-AZ DB to Multi-AZ Standby

Single Point of Failure: Production PostgreSQL database deployed in single AZ — Lila Chen (Principal Cloud Architect)

~8 min20 XP

INCIDENT #02

CQRS Read/Write Split: Offloading Analytical Queries to Read Replicas

Primary DB Saturation: Read-heavy traffic starving transaction write locks — Carlos Gomez (DevOps Engineer)

~8 min20 XP

INCIDENT #03

Event-Driven Decoupling: Replacing Synchronous HTTP with SQS Dead-Letter Queue

Cascading Timeout: Order checkout blocked by synchronous email invoice service — Devon Reed (Senior SRE)

~8 min20 XP

INCIDENT #04

Caching Strategy Architecture: Switching from Cache-Aside to Write-Through Redis

Stale Cache Data: Cache-aside pattern causing inconsistent product inventory counts — Elena Rostova (Senior Infrastructure Engineer)

~8 min20 XP

INCIDENT #05

Multi-Tier VPC Network Architecture: Enforcing Public, Private & Isolated Subnets

Security Audit Finding: Database instances provisioned with public IP addresses — Chloe Zhao (DevOps Engineer)

~8 min20 XP

INCIDENT #06

Serverless vs Containers Trade-Off: Cold-Start Mitigation & Provisioned Concurrency

Latency Spike: 8-second cold starts on serverless checkout Lambda API — Marcus Brody (Release Engineering Manager)

~8 min20 XP

INCIDENT #07

Storage Tiering Architecture: S3 Intelligent-Tiering & Lifecycle Transition

Storage Cost Spurt: 80 TB of historical log backups sitting in S3 Standard — Morgan Bailey (Director of Technical Support)

~8 min20 XP

INCIDENT #08

Well-Architected Reliability Review: Eliminating Single Point of Failure (SPOF)

Architecture Review: Addressing high-risk issues in Well-Architected Reliability pillar — Carlos Gomez (DevOps Engineer)

~8 min20 XP

INCIDENT #09BOSS OUTAGE

Boss: Disaster Recovery Multi-Region Active-Passive Architecture & Failover

MAJOR DR DRILL: Validating multi-region warm standby failover from us-east-1 to us-west-2 — VP of Engineering (Incident Commander)

~15 min50 XP

INCIDENT #10BOSS OUTAGE

Boss: Cloud Migration Architecture Crisis — Database Re-Platforming Cutover

MIGRATION CUTOVER SEV-1: On-prem to AWS Aurora database migration at risk of data loss! — VP of Engineering (Incident Commander)

~15 min50 XP