Uptime: A Cloud Provider Sim

The larger signup bonus is not the whole deal in Uptime. Its official opening guide, last edited September 6, compares Harold’s Blog with Henderson Insurance. Harold needs one small virtual machine and pays a $50 signup bonus; Henderson wants two larger virtual machines and pays $200. The guide asks you to choose a request that fits the host you installed.

A virtual machine is a slice of the physical server presented as a customer’s computer, as the guide explains. The extra bonus therefore arrives with extra promised work. Those are published opening examples, not a session we played, and they do not establish that the larger customer is either impossible or always preferable on a given starting setup.

The developer’s site adds another demand on capacity: services have coordinating control planes and per-host agents that compete for compute. The equipment supports the machinery that runs the service as well as the workload the customer buys. That makes an empty rack slot a different thing from a fully supported customer commitment.

The opening guide also requires a connected path from host through switch and gateway to the internet handoff. A mounted server alone does not satisfy that described setup. The interesting management decision is consequently concrete before the company grows large: what can this installed, powered and connected stack promise to keep available?

Investigate Uptime for that connection between a deal and the hardware beneath it. The first tempting bonus already asks the central question. Accepting the customer is the start of serving the workload, not the completion of the job.