Run an event end to end Preview

Prepare and rehearse

Use the organizer manual and make local. Choose the actual problem set and team count. Record the source/catalog revisions, supported hardware, runtime evidence, responsible organizer, schedule, communication route and cleanup owner. Catalog coverage is in progress; do not call every Docker or terminal problem tested.

Connect an optional competitor account

For AWS exercises, agree on accounts, region, resources and cleanup. Use infrastructure/templates/competitor-bootstrap.yaml, the displayed operator account, exact role name and persisted ExternalId. Verify each competitor account before selecting it for a team. Never distribute deployment-role credentials to participants.

Deploy, start and score

1. Create an event with its teams and problems.
2. Prepare and inspect each team's dormant Docker jobs; retry failed ownership-aware operations. Deploy AWS exercises separately.
3. Start the schedule and distribute the participant URL and the correct team keys.
4. Rehearse participant Start / resume and Stop (keep data), capacity rejection, correct/wrong answers, hints, leaderboard, team separation and a failed environment.
5. For AWS Battle, register both endpoints, observe scoring, test a selected-team disruption and verify revert plus actual service health.

Finish safely

End Event to stop scoring. Remove owned environments using the organizer teardown actions and verify completion. Retain results and back up the full data directory. For an ordinary local pause use make down; restart with make local and the same directory. Stop is not AWS cleanup. Cloud make deploy requires reviewed IAM setup; make destroy confirms the installation and deletes platform-owned data by default. It leaves external Turso rows; make destroy-all explicitly resets them. Use event Teardown before platform removal for exercise resources. Cloud hosting uses Lambda and Cognito, selectable Turso or DynamoDB, generic CloudFormation deployment, flag/multi-flag and scheduled scoring, participant Console/CLI access, and native coordination including Cryptography Battle. Docker/Compose exercises are local-only and are not listed in the cloud catalog. Live AWS and hosted Turso event capacity remain unverified.

See the repository's docs/operations/event-runbook.md for the operating checklist.

New Docker events prepare dormant team/problem jobs, up to 512 per event. Participants use Start / resume and Stop (keep data). Stop retains the existing writable layer and volumes, not RAM; there is no automatic eviction or reset. Existing events retain their legacy lifecycle.

Defaults allow 3 active environments per team, 12 across the host and a 4096 MiB sum of configured container-memory caps. These are admission limits, not measured usage or machine-size guarantees. New Compose plans preserve authored caps and add 512 MiB memory, 1 CPU and 256 PIDs where missing. Override admission limits with make local LOCAL_ARGS="--max-active-per-team 3 --max-active-environments 12 --container-memory-mib 4096" after reviewing the workload.

The 40 gateway slots apply only to active environments. Dense runtime-port assignments survive Stop. A synthetic 20-problem × 5-team plan allocated 100 jobs using 105 runtime ports; this proves allocation and lifecycle behavior, not concurrent Docker performance. See docs/local-play-requirements.md for measurement guidance.