Learn distributed systems by building real infrastructure on your laptop

1 point

2 months ago

DistSim is an open-source distributed systems simulator. Each machine is a real Docker container with Ubuntu, a terminal, and full networking. You install services (Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, etc.), configure them, connect them, and then break them with chaos engineering.

The motivation: I wanted to learn distributed systems hands-on but didn't want to pay for multiple VPS instances. Blog posts explain concepts well but you never actually configure a load balancer, set up replication, or debug a cascading failure.

22 services, browser-based terminals, visual topology editor, code editor, chaos engineering, API load testing.

Install: git clone + bash install.sh (needs Docker + Go + Node.js)

https://github.com/hamidlabs/distsim