The Raft Consensus Algorithm (2015)
11 days ago
- #Distributed Systems
- #Fault Tolerance
- #Consensus Algorithm
- Raft is a consensus algorithm designed for ease of understanding, equivalent to Paxos in fault-tolerance and performance.
- Consensus is a fundamental problem in fault-tolerant distributed systems, requiring multiple servers to agree on values.
- Raft is used in replicated state machines to ensure all servers process the same commands in the same order.
- Visualizations like RaftScope and 'The Secret Lives of Data' help understand Raft's workings.
- The Raft paper, 'In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm,' details the algorithm and received a Best Paper Award.
- Diego Ongaro's Ph.D. dissertation expands on Raft, including a formal specification in TLA+.
- Several Raft-related papers and talks provide further insights and implementations.
- Courses and programming assignments on Raft are available for educational purposes.
- The raft-dev Google group is the best place for questions about Raft and its implementations.
- Multiple Raft implementations exist in various languages, with varying features like leader election, log replication, and persistence.