Spice Runner is a browser-based endless runner game built as a demo app for the talk The Spice Must Flow: The Fremen Guide to Sustainable Observability, first presented at Øredev 2025 in Malmö, Sweden.
The game exists to make a point: even a simple, throwaway game generates a surprising amount of telemetry — and that telemetry has real financial and environmental costs. The dashboard on Grafana Play shows real player data, live.
🎮 Play it | 📊 Live dashboard | 💻 Source code
What it demonstrates
- Grafana Faro for Real User Monitoring (RUM) — every jump, game start, score, and collision is instrumented as a custom event
- Full observability stack on Kubernetes: Prometheus for metrics, Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana Tempo for traces, Grafana Alloy as the collector, Grafana for dashboards
- KEDA for event-driven autoscaling — the cluster grows when players are active and shrinks when they’re not, demonstrating cost-aware infrastructure
- k6 for load testing the leaderboard API
Architecture
The app has two layers:
Game + leaderboard — vanilla JavaScript game (runner.js) served by Nginx, with a Golang leaderboard API backed by PostgreSQL and Redis for score storage and caching.
Observability stack — Grafana Faro instruments the frontend; Nginx exporter, Alloy, Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus cover the backend. Everything is deployed on Kubernetes on GCP with persistent volumes so telemetry survives pod restarts.
The talk
The Spice Must Flow talk uses Dune as its framing. Arrakis is rich in spice but poor in water; our systems are rich in telemetry but poor in budget and carbon budget. The Fremen survive by wasting nothing — the talk argues we should apply the same philosophy to observability.
Key themes: the hidden environmental cost of observability, using KEDA to right-size resources dynamically, and the single most effective thing you can do to reduce cost — deleting telemetry you don’t actually need.
The talk has been given at Øredev 2025 and will be given again at ExpoQA Madrid 2026.