The DarkCON CTF was the 3rd CTF by DarkArmy within last 12 months we hope you enjoyed this. Preparations for CTF began from December till lasting till the 18th of Jan and everything went as per schedule (learning from past mistakes).
Now let's keep it short.
Teams Registered: 1000+
Teams Participated: 625
Total size of Challenge files: 655 MB
No. of requestes served: 23k+
Files Served: ~200 GB
Total web requests served by the CTF infra: 15 Million+
Total Challenges: 42
Total Challenge solves: 2318
The CTF infra was self sponsored by DarkArmy since many of us had student credits from AWS and Azure (check out the GitHub Student Developer Pack).
For the CTF site we used rctf which was hosted on a
B1s (1 vcpu, 1GiB memory) then scaled up to Standard DS2 v2 (2 vcpus, 7 GiB memory)
on Azure's Central India DC before the event running on premium SSDs. It clearly was an overkill considering the low resource footprint and efficiency of rctf. Even at the highest load CPU utilization remained < 5%. Most resource hungry process on our CTF server was the backup script which was backing up all the data to a Google Drive every 15 minutes.
All the challenge files were served from the Azure Zone-Redundant BlobStorage hosted in South East Asia.
Costs of B1s (18 days) + DS2v2(3 days) + SSD + Blob Storage ~= $30
Web, pwn challenges that needed hosting were setup on various AWS servers pooled up by our team. The initial server setup for all of them was automated using Ansible and challenges were hosted on them using docker and a common setup script to automate it.
Any queries we'd be glad to answer.