The Microservice Dungeon (short MSD) is a game where players compete against each other to achieve the highest possible score. Each player service controls a swarm of robots. Robots move across the game board, mine resources, purchase upgrades, and battle each other. All of these actions earn points for the player. The notable difference to a regular multiplayer game is that the players are not persons but microservices, implemented by a developer (or developer team). The robot swarm is usually not controlled manually, but by an algorithm implemented in the player service. MSD 2.0 allows us to deep-dive into the hardcore specifics of distributed large systems. This guided project will focus on monitoring the system.
#rollenzuweisung
and click on
gp.
Then you automatically get access to the channel(s) relevant for this module.
For the general project definition, please see the project page in the Master Digital Science web portal. For the introduction, we meet on 24.04.2026 in room 3219. After that, we will organize ourselves in an agile way.
| What | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Literature on DDD | Annotated reading list on DDD and microservices, suitable as an entry point into these topics | Link |
| Wolff, E. (2018). Microservices: Grundlagen flexibler Softwarearchitekturen | German-language introduction to microservices, highly recommended | Link |
| The Microservice Dungeon: Realitätsnahe Lehre komplexer Softwarearchitekturen | Paper on the motivation and origin of the Microservice Dungeon (in German) | Link |
| Documentation MSD 1.0 | Documentation of the first version of the MS Dungeon (for comparison with the concepts for version 2.0) | Link |
| Source code of MSD 1.0 | Sources of MSD version 1.0 | Link |
| Motivation for the rebuild in version 2.0 | Talk given at DigX 2025; I will repeat it as an introduction in the kickoff workshop | Link |
| Documentation MSD 2.0 | Current state of the MSD 2.0 documentation, still under construction and rather rudimentary | Link |
| Miro board on MSD 2.0 | For sketches from the MSD 2.0 specification | Link |
| MSD 2.0 Governance Board | Minutes on architectural decisions for MSD 2.0 | Link |
| Source code of MSD 2.0 | Sources of MSD version 2.0 | Link |
| Event simulator (by Jannik Alexander) | For “simulating” how the actual events of an MSD 2.0 game unfold. Can be used in the projects. | Link |
The grading for this Guided Project will follow the general grading scheme for Guided Projects outlined here.
Both the quality and the effort part of the grading will be based on
We will have to define a couple of meetings.
This workshop is marking the end of phase one of the project where you develop your own players. It should be a full day where you are able to finalize work on your player and then we make an example run and see who wins just for fun. In the second part of the day, we will take a deep dive into our monitoring topics and do a planning of the tasks we want to do there.
That should be half a day meeting in presence to discuss architectural questions, problems, obstacles, ideas.
This is the workshop to close the project. Your monitoring solution should be in a state that it can actually be applied. We will do another code fight with the players that you developed in the beginning and we will see what your monitoring tools do.
The Guided Project Presentation Day is a kind of mini-conference where all the Guided Projects present their results.
I will give you an introduction to the Microservice Dungeon - motivation, architecture, and history. Afterwards, we will set you up so that you can start developing your own player, which will be the first phase of this project to get a feel for what MSD is all about.
Room: .
The project is set up and ready to start.