Distributed Consensus Simulator — Interactive System Design Lab

Interact with a Raft consensus cluster — trigger leader elections, introduce network partitions, and observe how the algorithm reaches agreement on a replicated log. See exactly what happens to writes during an election and why consensus is the hard problem that systems like etcd, ZooKeeper, and CockroachDB are built to solve.

Trigger elections, partition nodes, and watch a cluster agree — or fail to — in real time.

This free interactive simulation runs directly in your browser — no account needed. Adjust the parameters and watch how the system responds in real time.

Concepts covered

• distributed consensus
• Raft
• leader election
• Paxos
• etcd
• Zookeeper
• replicated state machine

Read the guide

• Distributed System Patterns — Microservices break things: Transactions, Consistency, and Reliability. Learn the patterns (Circuit Breaker, Saga, Outbox) we use to glue them back together.