How to CTF Infra - Beyond the Challenges and Flags
summary
Runs a cloud CTF framework used for six years and publishes the Terraform/Packer code on GitHub; platform runs CTFd on AWS with S3, RDS MySQL, ElastiCache, CloudFront and moved from VMs to containers on ECS. Teams automate infra with Terraform, use auto scaling groups, and debug real failures: misconfigured Gunicorn, a CTFd memory leak and leaked DB connections that required rolling fleets. Volunteers split into challenge builders, owners, testers plus platform and social media, and the setup repeatedly works with on‑call ops and Discord coordination.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00CTF infra introduction
- 1:47Why run CTF beyond flags
- 5:38CTFd setup overview
- 16:33Debugging scaling issues
- 20:04Cloud Village GitHub plans
- 23:31Volunteer team roles
- 26:00Challenge builder roles
- 30:59Platform incident response
- 33:03Community collaboration
- 35:56Sustainable volunteer community
- 38:10Q&A
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