Welcome to the first challenge in the Open Ecosystem Challenge series!
Your mission: restore interstellar communication by fixing a broken GitOps setup.
This is a hands-on troubleshooting exercise using Kubernetes, Argo CD, and Kustomize.
The entire infrastructure is pre-provisioned in your Codespace — Kubernetes cluster, Argo CD, and sample app are ready to go.
You don’t need to set up anything locally. Just focus on solving the problem.
The Backstory
Welcome aboard the GitOps Starliner, a multi-species engineering vessel orbiting the vibrant planet of Polaris-9. Life in this quadrant is wonderfully diverse — from the whispering cloud-dwellers of Nebulon to the rhythmic click-speakers of Crustacea Prime.
Communication between species used to be seamless, thanks to the Echo Server, a universal translator that instantly echoed your words in the listener’s native format.
But lately, something’s off.
Messages are getting scrambled. Some transmissions never arrive. The Echo Server, deployed across the Staging Moonbase and the Production Outpost, is no longer syncing properly. The Argo CD dashboard shows no active deployments, and telemetry is suspiciously quiet.
You’ve been assigned to restore interstellar communication before the next critical mission.
Choose Your Level
Each level is a standalone challenge with its own Codespace that builds on the story while being technically independent — pick your level and start wherever you feel comfortable!
Beginner: Broken Echoes
Status: 
Available
Topics: ArgoCD ApplicationSets, GitOps fundamentals
The Echo Server is misbehaving. Both environments seem to be down, and messages are silent. Your mission: investigate the ArgoCD configuration and restore proper multi-environment delivery.
Adventure 01: Echoes Lost In Orbit | Easy: Broken Echoes
Intermediate: The Silent Canary
Status: Available
Topics: Argo Rollouts, Progressive Delivery, Prometheus
After fixing the communication outage, the Intergalactic Union welcomed a new species: the Zephyrians. The communications team attempted to deploy their language files using a progressive delivery system, but the rollout is failing. Your mission: debug the broken canary deployment and bring the Zephyrians’ voices online.
Start the Intermediate Challenge
Expert: Echoes in the Dark
Status: Available
Topics: Argo Rollouts, Progressive Delivery, Prometheus, Open Telemetry, Jaeger
After fixing the Zephyrian communications, word of your progressive release mastery spread across the galaxy. The Bytari, a highly advanced species from the Andromeda sector, were impressed. 
They want to apply progressive delivery to their mission-critical service: HotROD (Hyperspace Operations & Transport - Rapid Orbital Dispatch), an interstellar ride-sharing service handling dispatch requests across thousands of star systems. Every millisecond of latency matters, and any error could strand travelers between dimensions.