Marc’s Blog is the personal site of Marc Brooker, an engineer at AWS in Seattle. Rather than product announcements or news, it collects long-form essays on how distributed systems behave, especially under failure. The author’s background spans EC2, EBS, databases, serverless, and now agentic AI safety, and that range shows in the topics covered.
A recurring feature is the use of animations to build intuition. In the post on metastability and lost writes, an interactive example shows how a Raft cluster can lose writes when a single member’s storage layer misreports fsync(). The goal is not to replace formal treatment but to give readers a mental model they can carry into design reviews and debugging.
The blog suits engineers, architects, and students who already understand basic consensus and storage concepts and want to go deeper into failure modes. Readers working on replication, durability, or cloud infrastructure will find the most direct value, though the essays are readable for anyone curious about system design.
Use it as supplementary reading rather than a reference manual: open the animations alongside the text, pause to predict outcomes before watching them, and follow the linked publications for more formal material. Posts are infrequent but substantial, so subscribing via Mastodon or Twitter is a practical way to keep up.
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