A few weeks ago I posted the Newsletter about the Paxos Paper over on Reddit. And boy, Reddit did deliver…quite some hate, but also great comments and ideas.
So I did, what every reasonable, grown up man on the interned does: I went to war with the trolls. We fought back and forth in the comment section, me trying to teach them a lesson.
…just kidding. Never do that, you can’t win. So I went ahead, reported all the hate comments and got them removed by the Reddit moderators within a few hours. Would count this as win for me.
Sorry, I got lost. Back on topic.
One comment mentioned that “Paxos is sooo outdated”, and that Raft would be A LOT easier to understand.
To give that person a point, Raft is more recent, and I thought it would be a good move to include it in the newsletter. This way, you can check for yourself which consensus algorithm you like better.
Abstract:
Raft is a consensus algorithm for managing a replicated log. It produces a result equivalent to (multi-)Paxos, and it is as efficient as Paxos, but its structure is different from Paxos; this makes Raft more understandable than
Paxos and also provides a better foundation for building practical systems. In order to enhance understandability, Raft separates the key elements of consensus, such as leader election, log replication, and safety, and it enforces a stronger degree of coherency to reduce the number of states that must be considered. Results from a user study demonstrate that Raft is easier for students to learn than Paxos. Raft also includes a new mechanism for changing the cluster membership, which uses overlapping majorities to guarantee safety.
Download Link:
https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf
Additional Links: