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In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm conceptpaper

Ongaro & Ousterhout, 2014.

Ongaro & Ousterhout, 2014. Designed Raft as a consensus algorithm with the explicit goal of being understandable, in response to Paxos being notoriously hard. Decomposed consensus into leader election, log replication, and safety. The paper itself is a teaching document and includes pedagogical experiments showing students learn Raft faster than Paxos. Influence: powers etcd, Consul, CockroachDB, TiKV, MongoDB's replica set protocol, and most modern systems where 'we use consensus' shows up.

see also

• raft
• paxos
• consensus
• leader-election

aliases: Raft paper

topics: distributed-systems, consensus

references:

• Raft paper (PDF)