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Raft has spawned a huge ecosystem of consensus libraries across various languages. This has 'democratized' the consensus algorithm and has made it easier to bui
by karterk 6y ago
Raft has spawned a huge ecosystem of consensus libraries across various languages. This has 'democratized' the consensus algorithm and has made it easier to build distributed systems.
Is it perfect? No, as another comment here points out, Raft might not be as fast as some other more complicated Paxos variants but that's okay for most use cases and is much easier to reason about.
To give an example of how powerful this is, I started implementing high availability for an opensource instant search engine I've been working on (https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense) and was able to get a basic clustering solution working in just a few days.
Pre-raft this would have taken a few weeks or would have required an external coordinator like Zookeeper. This way, Raft has unlocked so many opportunities.
- riffraff 6y agoforgive the question, but why did you choose to implement a coordination solution yourself rather than use an off the shelf system like Zookeeper?
- karterk 6y agoTo reduce deployment complexity. One or the primary goals of Typesense is simplicity. While writing a raft implementation myself would have been tricky, integrating with a consensus library made sense.