← Back to Builds
Distributed Systems Lab showcase

Distributed Systems Lab

10 Mar 2026

A comprehensive laboratory setup for testing consensus algorithms and distributed state machines in a controlled network environment.

Distributed Systems Go Raft Docker

Project Overview

This project was born out of a necessity to understand how distributed systems behave under network partitions and latency. I built a playground where I can deploy nodes, simulate failures, and observe how algorithms like Raft or Paxos handle the chaos.

Core Features

  • Failure Injection: Automatically drop packets or introduce jitter between specific nodes.
  • Visualizer: A real-time dashboard showing the current leader and log replication status.
  • Containerized: Every node runs in an isolated Docker container, mimicking a real-world deployment.

“Distributed systems are hard, but visualizing them makes them slightly less terrifying.”

Why I Built This

I was tired of reading whitepapers without being able to see the edge cases in action. By building this lab, I can verify properties like linearizability and eventual consistency using actual code rather than just mental models.

Feel free to check out the discussion on Reddit below!