GoKawiilMarc Brooker uses animations and real Postgres traces to show metastable failures
AWS engineer Marc Brooker describes building interactive animations to illustrate system failure modes, including a 'Stability Sim' for metastability and a demonstration of Raft losing writes when a cluster member's storage lies about fsync(). He also shares a trace from Postgres 16 running in a MicroVM showing how a load spike pushes queries off the page cache and onto disk, slowing the database even after handling 20 queries-per-second comfortably before the spike.