Learn by Building Real Systems#

You know that feeling when you read about Raft consensus or consistent hashing and think “okay, but how would I actually implement this?” That gap between understanding concepts and building working systems is what LittleClusters is for.

Project-Based Learning#

Learn by building complete, real-world systems rather than doing isolated exercises. You’ll build distributed systems from scratch: key-value stores, message queues, caches, blockchains, and more. Learn consensus algorithms, replication strategies, and fault tolerance by implementing real-world patterns.

$ lc init kv-store
Created challenge in current directory.
  run.sh       - Builds and runs your implementation
  README.md    - Challenge overview and requirements
  lc.yaml      - Tracks your progress
  .gitignore   - Ignores .lc/ working directory (server files and logs)

Implement http-api stage, then run 'lc test'.

Build Incrementally#

Each stage introduces one new concept only after you’ve solidified the previous one. You can use any language you want to build it! Go, Rust, Python, or whatever you prefer.

The tests verify your system works by running it and checking behavior, not implementation details, so you can focus on learning the concepts without wrestling with complex setup.

$ lc test
Testing http-api: Store and Retrieve Data

✓ PUT Basic Operations
✓ PUT Edge and Error Cases
✓ GET Basic Operations
✓ GET Edge and Error Cases
✓ DELETE Basic Operations
✓ DELETE Edge and Error Cases
✓ CLEAR Operations
✓ Concurrent Operations - Different Keys
✓ Concurrent Operations - Same Key
✓ Check Allowed HTTP Methods

PASSED ✓

Run 'lc next' to advance to the next stage.

When you’re ready, advance to the next stage:

$ lc next
Advanced to persistence: Data Persistence

Your system must survive restarts and handle concurrent writes.

Read the guide: littleclusters.com/kv-store/persistence

Run 'lc test' when ready.

Open-Source by Default#

All tests, tooling, reference implementations, and this website are open source. Check out the CLI’s source code and this website’s source code.

$ lc list
Available challenges:

  kv-store             - Distributed Key-Value Store (8 stages)

Start with: lc init <challenge-name>

Ready to Build?#

Start with the distributed key-value store challenge. Or learn how it works if you want to understand the tooling first.