What a phenomenal landing page. Thanks to the animations I have a good idea of what this does and how it does it. You barely need to know what message queuing is to understand it.
Does anyone recommend any particular piece of software for creating these types of visualizations with relative ease? I've always been a fan of animations for helping to understand some technical topics.
As erwinkle mentioned, these animations use anime.js
If you want to build something but don't really know how to do it, I would suggest the following:
1. Build the visual content in an SVG with Inkscape. It should be easy for you to build the layout with assets/item to animate. Don't forget to group items and set names so you can reference them later.
2. Once exported, insert the SVG in an HTML page and add anime.js. This library will let you animate the content you just created (you should be able to reference your named items from Inkscape and animate them). The learning curve might be tough depending on your experience regarding animation (or CSS in general).
Lottie.js is a library for animations in JavaScript, and after effects can export to it! You're obviously limited in what you can export, but if you do a basic after effects animation with shapes and text, it works fine.
Pretty sure it was made by Airbnb, and used in tons of apps like Google home
All the replies mention technologies to help you build one, but this chart looks like a modified, animated version of a Petri Net to me, which is a very useful chart for visually describing the flow of data between systems. I've built similar charts using PowerPoint and exporting the PowerPoint as a GIF... same effectiveness for internal use, but not something you're going to want to brag to your friends about.
Okay, this is going to sound weird, but I've used Keynote in the past. I'm sure PowerPoint can do this as well, but Keynote has Magic Move, and you can export this animation. It's very easy to work with, and do simple animations. I'm sure there are much better tools for this, but as someone who knew Keynote, this was always effective for me.
Keynote is surprisingly good for this, and I’ve used it for animated data flow visualizations in the past.
While I like the idea of something like anime.js and think it raises the ceiling on what’s possible, I’d still probably start with something like keynote just to get the idea out of my head and into a format I can validate before going into code.
I've heard Framer can make some impressive animations, but I don't know much about how well they export to web. What's on display here is really cool, it's all animated SVG.
The animations are very slick, but I can still grumpily pick at them: the "Clustering and Quorum-based Replication" one shows 4 total servers (suboptimal number because quorum requires 3/4 where I'd prefer to require 2/3 or 3/5) and all the followers acking before the primary proceeds (the animation could show one lagging instead).
4 might be useless compared to 3 from a "required quorum" PoV but if you want to stay up with 1 failure and the load can't be handled on 3 servers but 4 is OK, it is optimal isn't it?
I.e. selection of ideal server count is a multi-dimensional problem.
Worse than useless from a quorum perspective, because you've increased the number of servers that have to participate in quorum (quickly) without increasing the number that don't. Looking at it the other way, you go from having problems when 2/3 are slow/broken to having problems when 2/4 are slow/broken. (also note slow doesn't even mean the machine is having problems; in geographically distributed setups it may just be due to physical distance from the leader.)
Yes, 4 servers might handle more load than 3 servers [1], but so would 5 servers. I'd guess that if you've got enough message queue traffic that 3 servers can't handle the load, those servers aren't a significant fraction of your total cost. You might as well go to 5. Likewise, if 5 aren't enough, I'd skip over 6 and go to 7. If 7 aren't enough...I'd probably rethink my design entirely...but I'd prefer 9 to 8.
Alternatively, quorum systems can support "zero-weight replicas" which effectively don't vote but still can be useful for eventually consistent reads. Then you have this server that helps handle the load but doesn't increase the number of servers that have to participate in a round.
[1] if the load is overwhelmingly eventually consistent read operations and their multi-hop topology with proxies doesn't sufficiently reduce the load on the replicas. It's not obvious to me if this scenario is plausible or not.
