About Systems Explained

Distributed systems are hard to understand from documentation alone. You can read about Raft consensus, LSM-trees, or partition rebalancing — but until you see them in action, the tradeoffs don't click.

The Problem

Most distributed systems education is either too theoretical (academic papers) or too practical (vendor docs that assume you already understand the concepts). There's a gap in the middle: interactive, visual explanations that let you play with the parameters and see what happens.

Our Approach

Every visualization on this site is designed around a simple principle: feel the tradeoffs, don't just read about them.

• Drag a slider to change region size — watch parallelism, overhead, and recovery time respond
• Click to add data — see it flow through LSM-tree levels and trigger compaction
• Simulate a node failure — observe how the system recovers (or doesn't)

Who We Are

We're engineers who've spent years operating distributed databases, message queues, and compute clusters in production. We built these visualizations because they're the explanations we wished existed when we were learning.

Open Source

The visualizations on this site are open source. If you spot an error, want to add a feature, or have an idea for a new visualization, contributions are welcome on GitHub.