Distributed systems are a fundamental part of the applications we use every day. From the CRDTs that power the Google Docs this blog was edited on, to the large-scale CDN that delivers your favorite YouTube video. All these systems are invisible, yet they play a large part in our daily lives. 

Distributed systems like the aforementioned are the products of months of careful testing and research. However, with the pace of technology, large organizations do not have the luxury of multi-month research for a product. 

In this article, we'll explore how Alis Exchange is changing this timeline, enabling teams to go from initial concept to a proof-of-concept in days rather than months. 

The challenge with architecting systems for scale

When large teams embark on new projects, they can't just build a 'simple solution', even for an MVP. Their existing user base and scale demands a robust approach from day one.

Take Spotify, for example: if they needed to add video support to their CDN, they couldn't just bolt it on. They'd have to architect for millions of concurrent users, global distribution, and seamless playback across devices. In this environment, getting to a proof of concept quickly could mean the difference between beating competitors to market or watching them capture your users.

The first step to launching any new feature is getting out a design document, which outlines the goals and even non-goals of a project, the scope, and high-level implementation. Amazon is notorious for its six-page design docs, but even if your organization does not use lengthy design docs, you’d still need a shared reference for what a project should look like at a high level. This can take anywhere from weeks to months to get stakeholder buy-in and approval. 

Countless engineering hours are then spent in meeting rooms debating edge cases that might never occur, arguing over consistency models, and trying to predict failure scenarios for a system that doesn't exist yet.

But what if there was a better way?

Introducing Alis Exchange

Alis Exchange is an AI-powered platform that accelerates distributed system development and provides a collaborative environment where teams can model, validate, and iterate on their architectures using actual GCP infrastructure.

While stakeholders might not understand why high throughput is key to maintaining availability during peak loads, they can get behind a proposal that ensures users won't experience buffering during the next viral video trend.

Alis helps you automatically translate technical decisions into business impact, turning 'we need read replicas across regions' into 'customers in Europe will experience the same snappy performance as those in the US.'

Being integrated directly with Google Cloud means the time from design to testing collapses dramatically. Instead of spending weeks debating theoretical architectures, your team can spin up actual infrastructure, test real failure scenarios, and validate performance assumptions within days. 

Real-world example: distributed IP cache design

Understanding what Alis Exchange can do is great, but what does this look like in practice? For this demonstration, imagine your team needs to design a distributed IP cache because customers have been requesting dedicated egress IPs to whitelist with their enterprise partners. 

To do this, we will be using Ideate, one of the tools that Alis Exchange provides, which allows you to create and collaborate on a design document. 

Let's see how Alis Ideate transforms what would typically be a month-long design phase into a design document you can use to get early input from your team. 

In the screencast above, we start with a structured prompt containing a project brief, high-level goals for the system, and business context.  You can add more depending on your use case. 

Project Brief: Distributed IP Cache for PaaS Platform

• We need to design a distributed IP caching system for our PaaS platform that provides temporary dedicated IP addresses to client applications.

• Business Context: Our PaaS customers are requesting dedicated egress IPs for their applications to whitelist with third-party services. Currently, all traffic routes through shared NAT gateways, making enterprise integrations difficult. We need a solution that can dynamically allocate and manage IP addresses across multiple regions.
  
  High-Level Goals:

• Provide on-demand dedicated IPv4 addresses to customer workloads
• Support automatic IP recycling and lease management (configurable TTL from 1 hour to 30 days)
• Enable cross-region availability with regional failover
• Maintain an audit trail of IP assignments for compliance
• Support both API and UI-based allocation requests

The result is a fully fleshed document containing a comprehensive overview, detailed problem analysis, user personas with their specific pain points, key usage scenarios, and even competitive analysis against the current shared NAT gateway approach.

Notice how Alis automatically expanded our technical requirements into business-readable sections, such as 'User Pain Points' and 'Business Impact'?

Product teams can take these generated personas and conduct further user interviews, while engineering can use the same document to understand the technical constraints.

With a single prompt, you've created a document that bridges the gap between business stakeholders and technical teams. But it doesn't stop there; you can generate UI specs using tools like Figma Make, all using the context from your Ideate document. This enables UX designers to create early mockups and gauge user interest.

We can also take this a step further with another Alis Exchange’s tool: Build. Using Alis Build, you can take the document from Ideate and create actual infrastructure that supports the design you have just created, enabling you to save engineering hours on what would typically be a separate effort to stand up resources to support a proof of concept. 

PoC in days, not weeks

The difference between closing a deal and scaling is how quickly you can iterate and gain feedback from an idea. At enterprise scale, this becomes more important as you want to give potential customers a feel of what is to come and gauge their interest. This means putting something out that works but is also reliable.

In this article, we discussed how distributed systems power the applications we use daily, yet architecting them at scale traditionally requires months of careful planning, debate, and documentation. 

Alis Exchange changes this equation. By providing an AI-powered platform integrated with Google Cloud, teams can model, validate, and iterate on distributed architectures in real-time. As we demonstrated with the distributed IP cache example, what would typically require weeks of design documents and stakeholder reviews can now produce a document that you can take into your next meeting. 

The real power isn't just in the speed, it's in the ability to show rather than tell. When stakeholders ask about failure scenarios, you demonstrate them. In a world where being first to market can make or break your product, the ability to go from concept to validated prototype in days rather than weeks isn't just an improvement, it's a competitive advantage.

If this interests you and you would love to see your team perform at such speed, then it’s time to explore what Alis Exchange can do for you. Visit alisx.com to book a demo and start accelerating your path from idea to impact today.