4 ms·
When I was at AWS I heard the same phrase from a DE, probably the same guy, and once heard him also say "Raft is just a special case of Paxos to try to simplify
by gamegoblin 4y ago
When I was at AWS I heard the same phrase from a DE, probably the same guy, and once heard him also say "Raft is just a special case of Paxos to try to simplify it, but regular Paxos isn't actually that hard, just use Paxos".
I was fairly junior at the time, and Raft seemed much more approachable, but after really forcing myself to read and understand the Paxos paper, I see what he meant. I am pretty sure most of the love for Raft was that the original whitepaper was just a better presentation. The actual Paxos algorithm is quite simple.
If you go into Raft already having mastered Paxos (as this DE was doing), it's clear that Raft is basically isomorphic to a special case of Paxos.
- jsmith45 4y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 This paper argues basically argues that raft has a different leadership election mechanism than paxos, but that if you tweak some terminology, and make a few relatively reasonable implementation choices for paxos they are otherwise pretty equivalent. It even gives a raft style single page description of paxos (using raft style terminology), and shows how little it differs from the equivalent single page summary of raft. The main implementation choices they use are: - combined roles into a single server role - enforce that log messages are decided in sequence (largely to avoid the having to specify the behavior of newly elected leader to propose operations for the gaps (possibly no-ops)) - numeric ballot number, rather than lexicographical pair (but this changes nothing except making the summary slightly easier to express)