AWS GameDay 2025 Victory Story for Financial Companies 🏆

Kakao Bank's Container Platform Team won the Amazon EKS Kubernetes GameDay 2025. This competition went beyond simple problem-solving, taking the form of a hands-on CTF (Capture The Flag) that simulated complex and unpredictable failure scenarios that could occur in actual operating environments.

Participants became engineers at a fictional company called 'Unicorn Rental,' operating microservices based on an EKS cluster and had to resolve financial industry-specific scenarios involving high availability, security, and compliance. Beyond just solving problems, the key evaluation factor was the ability to keep services stable and optimized even after resolution.

To win, the team established the following strategy.

• Strategic Team Composition: They formed the team 'Girls Kube' by combining Kubernetes Engineers with extensive EKS operations experience and cloud experts proficient across AWS.
• Advance Preparation: They attended the Prep-session provided by AWS to understand the competition's operating format and scoring system, and learned optimization strategies that went beyond simple recovery.
• Real-time Response: During the 3-hour main game, they responded to real-time failures based on technical capability and teamwork—including message queue optimization—to earn a high score.