Questions

Yes. Your control room starts with settings that work. Each time you change a lever, a practice wave shows you what changed.

Yes. Practice mode needs no sign-in. It is the same game with the same levers, and you play against sample teams. Your runs stay in this browser.

Ranked runs need a Qovery sign-in and a real environment for your team. You can ask for one email when ranked sign-ups open.

About 10 minutes for your first ranked run: name your team, play a few practice waves, then launch the run.

After that, a few minutes on most days is enough. The daily challenge takes about 2 minutes. You get 3 ranked runs a day and only your best run of the month counts, so you don't need to play every day. More ranked runs give you more chances.

Use practice waves before your ranked runs, and change one lever at a time. If your instances touch the max line, raise the max or lower the scale-up trigger. Watch the cloud cost too: instances that wait for nothing lose points. Move up a league for more championship points, and read how last month's top 10 played. The full list is in How to win, and the prizes are on the home page.

You can play the daily challenge: one wave a day, the same for everyone, with three levers and its own ranking. If you play every day, you build a streak.

You can also win achievements, for example zero lost customers, half the budget, or a personal best. And you can play as many practice waves as you want.

Any time. Each calendar month is a season, from the 1st to the last day of the month (UTC). Your team and your app stay from one month to the next. The leaderboard starts again on the 1st, and past months stay public.

You need a Qovery account. It saves your team, your app and your scores from one day to the next. Sign in with GitHub, GitLab or Google. If you don't have an account, signing in creates one. It is free and you don't need a credit card.

You don't need your own cloud, servers or credit card. Your team's app runs on Qovery's infrastructure, and Qovery pays for it.

Each ranked run uses real cloud resources that Qovery pays for, and some countries cannot take part (see the official rules). Your LinkedIn profile helps us check that every player can take part.

It is optional when you sign up, but we strongly recommend it. If you leave it empty, we will ask for it before you can win a prize.

Every account is accepted when you sign up. Qovery can check accounts at any time, and can disable an account or a team that breaks the official rules: a player from a country that cannot take part, cheating or fraud (for example several accounts), or use of the infrastructure for anything other than the game. A disabled team leaves the leaderboard.

In the monthly ranking, no: each league has its own ranking, because the waves and budgets are different.

In the yearly championship, yes. Places 1 to 10 earn 25, 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 or 1 points. The points are multiplied by 1 in Beginner, 2 in Intermediate, 3 in Expert and 4 in KEDA. So winning Expert gives three times more points than winning Beginner.

Each request is fast (under 300 ms), slow (300 ms to 5 s) or failed (an error, or no answer after 5 s).

For each wave, the score is: fast − slow − 5 × failed, divided by the cloud cost of your instances at public prices. If fewer than 99% of requests succeed, or if the p95 latency is over the target, the score is cut in half. If one wave goes over the budget, the whole run does not count.

Your league score is half your average wave score and half your lowest wave score.

Yes. Ranked runs use a GKE cluster on Google Cloud, managed by Qovery. During the wave, your app really scales up. One ranked run costs between $0.15 and $0.25 of real cloud resources, and Qovery pays for it. The cloud cost and the money lost in the game are game numbers: nobody gets a bill.

Your levers are real settings. The scale-up trigger, min and max instances, CPU and RAM become your app's autoscaling target, replica count and resource requests. Each team can use at most 16 vCPU and 16 GB in total, so no team can use the whole cluster.

Practice waves, the daily challenge and the panel on the home page use a simulation of the same cluster. We built the simulation from real runs.

Each team gets its own environment with two services: your app (a small Go service) and a load generator. The load generator calls your app on its internal address, so internet latency never counts against you.

The levers are Kubernetes settings that Qovery applies to your app: the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler target (CPU or memory), the min and max replicas, the CPU and memory requests, the readiness probe and, in the KEDA league, KEDA scalers. A change takes about 15 seconds through the Qovery API.

Yes. Connect your coding agent to the Qovery MCP Server and paste the prompt below. Then open console.qovery.com to see your environment. You need a cloud account for the cluster (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or Scaleway). Qovery has a 14-day free trial.

Using the Qovery MCP Server, build an autoscaling playground in my Qovery organization, like the Absorb the Wave game:

1. Create a project "wave-lab" with an environment "lab" on my cluster.
2. Write a small Go HTTP service, "target-app": GET /work burns about 8 ms of CPU per request; GET /healthz and GET /readyz answer 200. Add a Dockerfile, push it to a new Git repository, and deploy it on Qovery with 500 mCPU and 512 MB, min 2 and max 18 instances, autoscaling at 60% CPU (advanced setting hpa.cpu.average_utilization_percent) and a readiness probe on /readyz.
3. Write a load generator, "loadgen", in the same environment. It sends open-model traffic to target-app on its internal host: 100 requests per second, a ramp to 1,000 in 15 seconds, held for 2 minutes, then back to 100. Requests time out after 5 seconds. Every 5 seconds it logs requests under 300 ms, slower ones and failed ones.
4. Deploy both, run one wave, and show me how many instances the autoscaler started and when, and what the wave cost.
Keep the whole setup under 16 vCPU and 16 GB.

Beginner: the scale-up trigger, min and max instances, and CPU (500 to 1000 mCPU) and RAM (512 to 1024 MB) per instance.

Intermediate adds the scale-down delay and the scaling metric (CPU or memory). Expert adds the max scale-up step, a warm pool, the startup probe delay and spot instances. KEDA adds scaling on the number of requests, the polling interval, scale to zero and scheduled scaling.

Teams have 1 to 3 players. Each team plays one league per month and can launch up to 3 ranked runs a day. Your best run of the month counts.

You can use any lever in your control room, and play as many practice waves as you want. You must not try to access your environment outside the control room, detect or filter the load generator, change settings during a ranked run, or go over the budget. Read the full official rules.

Each month, the top three teams win three months of a Qovery plan for their company, and a gift card for the team: Scale and $500 for 1st place, Growth and $300 for 2nd, Starter and $100 for 3rd.

If your company already pays for Qovery, you get the gift card but not the plan months. You can compare the plans on qovery.com/pricing. After each ranked run, every player also gets a result card to share.

Yes, after the month ends. The leaderboard then shows the settings of the top 10 teams of the month.