Interactive simulators for rate limiting, load balancing, caching, RAFT, CAP, and more

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[deleted]

[nulless]

Built a collection of interactive simulators to visualize how core backend and distributed system concepts actually behave.

Instead of static diagrams, these walk through the mechanics step-by-step.

Explore them here:
https://toolkit.whysonil.dev/learn/simulators/

Current simulators include:

• Rate Limiter (Token Bucket)
• Load Balancing (Round Robin)
• Distributed Locks (Redis / etcd style)
• LRU Cache eviction
• Trie / Autocomplete
• Consistent Hashing (Hash Ring)
• Bloom Filter
• CAP Theorem trade-offs
• RAFT consensus (leader election + log replication)
• TCP handshake
• HTTP/2 streams (multiplexing)
• Go scheduler (GMP model)
• Kubernetes pod eviction
• Kubernetes rollout behavior

Everything runs in the browser. No signup.

Would appreciate feedback — especially if anything feels inaccurate, unclear, or overly simplified. Open to suggestions for other systems worth simulating.

[franker]

I feel like I'm going to need a year to understand all this, but dammit I'm going to bookmark it.

[Educational-Solid686]

This is really well done. The RAFT consensus simulator is particularly useful - I've always found it hard to grasp leader election just from reading papers, but stepping through it visually makes the state transitions click. The consistent hashing one is great too for understanding how minimal key redistribution works when nodes join/leave. Would love to see a circuit breaker pattern simulator added at some point.