I Built a Distributed Systems Simulator So You Don't Need Cloud to Learn Infrastructure

Vivid Griffin
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:19:41 GMT
distributedsystems, webdev, programming, opensource

🚀 I Built a Distributed Systems Simulator So You Don't Need Cloud to Learn Infrastructure Every tech company runs the same 6 layers: 🌐 Traffic Entry → Nginx, HAProxy, API Gateway ⚙️ Orchestration → Kubernetes, Nomad 🧩 Service Mesh → Envoy, Istio 🗄️ Data → PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra 📨 Messaging → Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS 📊 Observability → Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger But learning these requires infrastructure. Multiple machines. Cloud accounts. Money. I built DistSim to remove that barrier. 🧠 What It Does DistSim runs on your laptop. Each "machine" is a real Ubuntu container. You get: 🖥️ Visual canvas to create and connect machines 💻 Real terminals, SSH into any machine from your browser 📦 22 installable services from Nginx to Vault 🧑‍💻 Built in code editor for Go, Node.js, Python 💥 Chaos engineering to inject failures and watch degradation 🧪 API tester to send requests and run load tests 🏗️ Example: Build a Load Balanced System 1️⃣ Create a lab with the "Medium Co