Learn Cloud Architecture by Building a Tower Defense Game

Ever wished learning AWS or cloud infrastructure felt less like studying a manual and more like, well, playing a game? What if you could understand scaling, load balancing, and server provisioning by defending a base from waves of enemies? That’s the exact premise behind Server Survival.

It’s a project that cleverly disguises cloud concepts as a tower defense game. Instead of placing archers and mages, you’re deploying auto-scaling groups and load balancers to handle incoming “traffic” (which, in this case, are literal enemies). It turns abstract infrastructure principles into something visual, interactive, and surprisingly intuitive.

What It Does

Server Survival is an open-source tower defense game where your towers are cloud services. You start with a basic server (your core tower) and earn resources by defeating enemies. With those resources, you build your infrastructure: deploy load balancers to distribute traffic, set up auto-scaling groups to automatically add more servers under pressure, and configure CDN caches to speed up response times. Each wave of enemies represents a spike in traffic, and your job is to scale your architecture to survive.

Why It’s Cool

The magic here is in the metaphor. The game directly maps gaming mechanics to real cloud concepts:

• Enemies = Incoming Requests/Network Traffic. They follow a path to your origin server.
• Load Balancer Towers = Distribute the enemy flow. They split up groups to prevent any single server from being overwhelmed.
• Auto-Scaling Group Towers = Dynamic resource allocation. They automatically spawn additional basic server towers when the enemy count gets too high.
• CDN Cache Towers = Edge location caching. They take out enemies (serve content) closer to the source, reducing latency and load on your origin.

It’s a hands-on, failure-friendly sandbox. You learn why scaling horizontally is important, what happens when your load balancer is misconfigured, and how caching can reduce load—all by watching your defenses succeed or crumble. The code itself is also a great reference, built with Phaser.js for the game engine, making it approachable for web developers to explore or contribute to.

How to Try It

You can play the game directly in your browser. No installation or cloud account needed.

1. Head over to the Server Survival GitHub repository: github.com/pshenok/server-survival
2. The README has a link to the live demo. You can usually find it under the "Environments" section or near the top of the README. Just click and start playing.
3. To run it locally, clone the repo, run npm install followed by npm start, and open your browser to localhost:8000.

Final Thoughts

As a way to internalize cloud architecture patterns, Server Survival is a brilliant idea. It won’t replace deep-dive documentation or hands-on console practice, but it serves as a fantastic conceptual primer. It’s especially useful for visual learners, educators looking for a fresh teaching tool, or any developer who wants to grasp the why behind scaling strategies in a low-stakes, engaging environment. Next time someone asks how a load balancer works, you might just send them a link to a game.

Follow for more interesting projects: @githubprojects