Distributed Systems Visualizer
Learn distributed systems concepts through interactive visualizations, step-by-step execution, and scenario-driven exploration.
Pick a topic
Choose a visualizer and load a scenario or start exploring manually.
Run the simulation
Play, pause, step, and inject failures to see protocol behavior.
Ask and validate
Compare scenarios, inject failures, and validate your understanding.
Explore Concepts
CAP Theorem
Explore trade-offs among Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance with real systems.
Lamport Clocks
Understand logical clocks and total-order delivery using broadcasts and acknowledgements.
Vector Clocks
Track causality, detect concurrency, and compare event orderings with vector clocks.
Chandy-Lamport Snapshot
Trace marker messages to record local state and in-flight messages for a global snapshot.
Eventual Consistency
Write with ONE/QUORUM/ALL and observe replication, conflict, and anti-entropy convergence.
CRDTs
Explore G-Counter, OR-Set, and RGA to see conflict-free merges across replicas.
Gossip & Anti-Entropy
Push, pull, and push-pull rounds spread updates across nodes without a central coordinator.
Merkle Anti-Entropy
Use Merkle trees to pinpoint divergence and sync only the necessary keys.
Quorum Replication
Tune W/R quorums and watch read-repair fix stale replicas after failures.
Replication Log
Track a leader and ISR followers, see high-watermarks advance, and observe lag.
Failure Detectors
Watch phi accrual and SWIM probes move nodes through alive, suspect, and failed.
Consistent Hashing
Distribute keys across a ring and see how virtual nodes minimize reshuffling.
Sharding + Rebalancing
Compare range vs hash sharding and watch shard movement as nodes join or leave.
Load Balancing
Route requests across workers, trigger backpressure, and see drops under load.
Distributed Locking
Acquire a lease, renew via heartbeats, and see timeouts trigger failover.
Two-Phase Commit
Watch a coordinator drive prepare/commit across participants and see how failures force aborts.
Distributed Transactions
Compare 3PC commit flow with saga steps and compensations on failure.
Network Partitions
Split the network, elect leaders per partition, then heal and resolve split-brain.
Paxos
Follow proposers and acceptors through prepare/accept rounds to reach agreement despite competing proposals.
Raft Consensus
Pick a leader, replicate logs, and survive failures. See how Raft keeps nodes consistent during elections and recovery.
Consensus Variants
Compare reconfiguration in Raft, stable leaders in Multi-Paxos, and EPaxos fast paths.
PBFT
Follow pre-prepare, prepare, and commit phases plus view changes under byzantine faults.