Without going too far down a rabbit hole, I think protocols like RAFT are fine for systems where you explicitly trust all of the machines in the network. That

Without going too far down a rabbit hole, I think protocols like RAFT are fine for systems where you explicitly trust all of the machines in the network. That being said, designing with "I trust all machines in my network" as a core primitive feels unreal. Most people don't have a full byzantine quorum style system, but if you're a big company it's totally possible one of your boxes got owned and is propagating bad data (hell, I'd even venture to say it's likely that some machines are owned in very big infrastructures). If that's the case, where do you put the protocols to control for malicious actors? Quorum-based 3-phased commits can give strong guarantees at the cost of some performance (see the Stellar protocol[0], which is actually pretty amazing). It's really cool to be able to make systems like this. That being said, very few use cases have true byzantine behavior (most of the time the set of machines in your network that are malicious is really small), so I think it's pretty safe for almost all use cases to use something like RAFT (but again, you kinda need to explicitly acknowledge the threat model tradeoff). The question, as always, is what performance metrics are you designing for and what is your threat model? If you know those things, you can make educated choices about how to build your distributed systems. [0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mazieres-dinrg-scp/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mazieres-dinrg-scp/