I built a free tool that shows where your system design breaks — with maths, not servers
Whiteboard designs never push back. You draw a load balancer, two servers and a database, someone asks "what happens at 5,000 requests per second?" , and nobody really knows. So I built System Canvas : a free, browser-based canvas where you design an architecture and simulate traffic through it. A design with a CDN, a load balancer, two servers in a VPC, Redis, a SQL database and a…
Jahid Hasan has created a free, browser-based tool called System Canvas that allows designers to model and simulate the performance of their system architectures. The tool uses a mathematical model based on queueing theory, specifically Little's Law (L = λW), to estimate how the design will behave under load. Users can create designs with components such as CDNs, load balancers, servers, databases, and microservices, and simulate traffic through the system.
The tool reports on metrics like p50, p95, and p99 latency, throughput, error rate, and component utilization, as well as the potential impact of failures. The design loop is simple: build a design, simulate a workload, and observe the results. The tool offers various components with adjustable settings, enabling users to explore different scenarios and optimize their designs.
System Canvas is completely browser-based, requiring no sign-up, and allows users to share designs via links or export reports as PNG images, PDFs, or Markdown. An AI assistant is available to help generate designs, and users can report any discrepancies in the results to contribute to the model's improvement.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
