Uptime: A Cloud Provider Sim

Underneath the floor is a real simulation. Every server, switch, cable and port is a live entity in a deterministic engine, and the network switches and routes real traffic across it. Power and cooling are budgets you can blow. Capacity is hardware that fills up. When something breaks, it breaks because the model says it should, and the fix is usually the one a real engineer would reach for. That was the whole goal: a build-it-with-your-hands tycoon sim that still holds up if you do this for a living.

Get it running, then keep it running. The moment traffic arrives, the simulation starts pushing back.

You own the full stack. The metal, the network, the services you sell, and the customers whose product lives on your kit. You're the thing they build on, so everything running on you is yours to keep alive, from the single box in the garage to a floor other companies depend on. The tenants have names, and they hand you their product expecting it to stay up. Reputation is the currency underneath all of it. You earn it slowly and you can lose it in one bad night, and the bigger the customer, the harder that fall lands. Sign a deal you can't carry, pack one host too tight, sleep through an SLA breach at 2am, and the money is the cheap part. You lose the trust that was about to send you the next customer.

So every yes is a wager on whether you can carry the new weight without dropping what you already hold. Turning business away is sometimes the correct call. The tenants you keep won't sit quietly either. They surge, they haggle, and they come back asking for more capacity, expecting a yes. The yes costs iron. One eats bandwidth. The next wants far more memory than its size suggests, and the one after that wants CPU nobody else is allowed to touch. Keep them happy and they say so out loud, and they bring friends.