Observed arrival · 2026-10-25
StackMonkey turns system diagrams into failure tests
A browser-based simulator lets users assemble distributed-system designs, vary traffic, and trigger failures to observe latency, dropped requests, and bottlenecks.
- For
- System-design learners and distributed-systems practitioners
- Worth noticing
- Starter designs state their assumed load and explicitly note what each architecture leaves out.
Field notes
The starter gallery covers ten familiar designs, from URL shorteners and chat to payment systems and ride sharing; entries pair a stated scale or load with components and a design spec. The page says designs identify what they leave out, and the simulator exposes a deterministic seed, 10 ms steps, event logs, throughput, p95 latency, success rate, and dropped calls. Listed failure controls include traffic surges, cache outages, and database saturation.
Observed signals
Read the marks
Editorial observations of this landing page, not a rating.
One card from the complete issue