It depends really... If you need an "offline readable copy" of something, then you need to be able to enter and exit the consensus group somehow. Perhaps that's

It depends really... If you need an "offline readable copy" of something, then you need to be able to enter and exit the consensus group somehow. Perhaps that's replaceable though by a client/server relationship with the Raft cluster and keep things separate? (Probably, though one of the systems I've worked with didn't have that as an option - though it likely could have been done as such). This was only really feasible because the value under consensus was very small (far less than 1MB). In a system where the value(s) are much larger, I think what you've proposed as a system of Raft clusters hosting shards makes a lot of sense too. Thanks for the considerate answer!