Raft Consensus
time to read 1 min | 189 words

After having struggled with understanding Paxos for a while, I run into the Raft Draft paper, and I was very impressed. To start with, I have read at least four or five papers about Paxos, read 2 – 5 implementations of the algorithm in different languages, implemented it myself, and I am still not really comfortable about it.

On the other hand, after doing a single pass through the Raft paper, I have a much greater sense of understanding what it is about, how it works and even how I can implement that, if I want to. Hell, I fully expect to be able to hand that paper to a passerby CS student and get a working implementation without needing to get Sheldon Cooper involved.  One thing to note, this paper and algorithm were heavily focused on making this understandable, and I think that they were quite successful in doing that. For that matter, I wish that other papers were this easy to read and follow.

Very interesting, and unlike the Paxos paper, immediately and almost painfully obvious how you would actually make use of something like that.

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