EPISODE 05 · 8–12 MIN · FREE BROWSER VISUAL NOVEL
The Terraform Tail Disaster
Forty-seven controllers. One very unhappy tail.
A wrong directory puts Wolfy’s animatronic tail in the production cloud. Contain the chaos, protect the real infrastructure, and choose what the team learns from it.
How the story begins
NarratorThursday, 10:47 AM. Wolfy had two infrastructure projects open in one terminal session. One supported MegaCorp’s 147-node, three-region platform. The other controlled an animatronic tail. Both directories looked familiar. Neither was prepared to explain itself before somebody pressed Enter.
WolfyProduction costs fifty thousand dollars a month. The tail should cost a Raspberry Pi, some servos, and my dignity whenever it wags during a serious call. Both use Terraform. I can see no problem with making their folders almost indistinguishable.
NarratorThe production plan looked sensible: twenty-three additions, fifteen changes, nothing to destroy. Wolfy launched an automatic apply, then glanced at Slack. A funny message earned a wolf emoji. On his desk, the robotic tail answered with a cheerful wag.
WolfyThe terminal says the apply finished. It also says servo_controller_ip, which is a surprisingly whimsical output for a microservices platform. Before I touch anything else, I need to decide whether to bring Sarah in immediately or confirm exactly which project just ran.
How you play
- Three decisions shape how Wolfy handles the incident, with composure, candor or curiosity.
- Two endings, with different consequence scenes along each route.
- Fourteen original anime-style paintings and an adaptive synthesized soundtrack.
- Plays in 8–12 min, free in your browser with no download or account. Progress saves on your device.
All ten episodes
- 01The Midnight DeploymentThe moon has no maintenance window.
- 02The Docker DisasterTen thousand users. One extremely fluffy avatar.
- 03The Cloud Convention CollisionOne wolf. Two commitments. No spare bandwidth.
- 04The On-Call HowlingIt is always DNS. Sometimes it also barks.
- 05The Terraform Tail DisasterForty-seven controllers. One very unhappy tail.
- 06The Demo Day DisasterOne presentation. Two audiences. The wrong red light.
- 07The AI Assistant AwakeningIt learned your patterns. All of them.
- 08The Slack Bot BetrayalHelpful answers. Unexpectedly personal training data.
- 09The Password Manager PanicExcellent security. Inconvenient search results.
- 10The Observability MoonshotThe first warning was a very quiet tail.