You've read the books. You've watched the YouTube videos. You can explain the CAP theorem to anyone who asks. But when you open AWS for the first time, you stare at 200+ services and think: "Where do I even start?"
Cloud architecture has a learning problem. Everything is theoretical until suddenly it's terrifyingly real. There's no safe space to break things, no way to see what happens when 10,000 users hit your system at once.
CloudPatterns changes that.
The Problem with Learning Cloud Architecture
Here's how most engineers learn system design:
- Read about patterns in books
- Watch conference talks
- Draw boxes on whiteboards
- Hope it works in production
Learning AWS isn't learning architecture. Knowing which button to click in the console doesn't teach you why you'd choose a queue over a direct API call. It doesn't show you what happens when your database connection pool runs out.
What CloudPatterns Does Differently
CloudPatterns is an interactive visual simulator for cloud architecture. Instead of reading about patterns, you build them. Instead of imagining what happens under load, you watch it happen.
Visual Node-Based Editor
Drag servers, databases, queues, and caches onto a canvas. Connect them together. Hit play and watch traffic flow through your system in real-time.
Real Simulation, Not Just Diagrams
When you add a producer sending 1,000 requests per second to your API, you'll see:
- Latency climb as the server gets overloaded
- Database connections getting exhausted
- The exact moment your system degrades
Turn on auto-scaling and watch it recover. Add a cache and see database load drop. These aren't animations—they're simulations with real math behind them.
Three Learning Modes
Whiteboard: Freestyle experimentation. Build whatever you want, test any scenario.
Classroom: Guided lessons that teach concepts step-by-step. The article you're reading sits next to an interactive editor. When the lesson says "add a cache," you add one and immediately see the impact.
Katas: LeetCode for architecture. Get a scenario with constraints ("handle 5,000 RPS under $50/month with 99.9% availability"), build a solution, and get scored on cost, latency, reliability, and throughput.
Who CloudPatterns Is For
Engineers Preparing for System Design Interviews
System design interviews are notoriously hard to practice. You can't "run" your whiteboard drawing. CloudPatterns lets you build and validate your solutions before the interview.
I wish I'd had this before my staff engineer interview. Drawing boxes that "scale horizontally" is easy. Actually designing something that handles failure is hard.
Developers Moving into Architecture Roles
You've built features. Now you need to think about the whole system. CloudPatterns bridges the gap between feature-level thinking and system-level thinking.
CS Students Learning Distributed Systems
Textbooks explain the theory. CloudPatterns makes it tangible. Watch a cache improve hit rates. See what happens when a node crashes. Understand why patterns exist by experiencing the problems they solve.
Core Concepts You'll Master
Traffic Patterns and Load
What does "10,000 requests per second" actually mean for your system? Set a traffic pattern and watch.
- Constant load: Steady state behavior
- Spike patterns: Black Friday scenarios
- Ramp patterns: Gradual growth
Resource Constraints
Every server has limits. CloudPatterns simulates:
- CPU and memory pressure
- Connection pool exhaustion
- Queue overflow and backpressure
- Storage capacity limits
Failure Modes
Systems fail. The question is how gracefully. Inject failures and observe:
- What happens when a database goes down?
- How does the load balancer route around crashed nodes?
- Can your queue absorb a traffic spike long enough for consumers to catch up?
Cost Optimization
Cloud bills matter. Every architecture decision has a cost. CloudPatterns shows estimated monthly costs as you build, helping you find the balance between performance and budget.
The Simulation Engine
Under the hood, CloudPatterns runs a tick-based simulation with 13 API types:
| Component | What It Simulates |
|---|---|
| Producer | Traffic generation with patterns |
| Request | HTTP endpoints with latency modeling |
| Queue | Message buffering and backpressure |
| Database | Connection pooling, query types |
| Cache | Hit/miss rates, TTL, eviction |
| Consumer | Async processing with batching |
| Lambda | Serverless with cold starts |
| Load Balancer | Traffic distribution, health checks |
| Autoscale | Dynamic horizontal scaling |
Each component has realistic behaviors: databases degrade under load, queues fill up and reject messages, caches evict entries when full. These aren't toys—they're models based on how real cloud services behave.
What Makes Good Architecture?
CloudPatterns evaluates your designs against four dimensions:
Cost: How much does it cost to run?
Latency: How fast does it respond? (P50, P95, P99)
Reliability: What percentage of requests succeed?
Throughput: How many requests can it handle?
The best architectures optimize across all four. Katas give you explicit targets and grade your solution.
Getting Started
CloudPatterns is currently in development. The whiteboard mode is available now—you can start experimenting with the visual editor immediately.
Classroom lessons and Katas are coming soon. Join the waitlist to get early access and help shape the platform.
System design doesn't have to be abstract. Build something, break it, fix it, and actually understand why.