Ben's visualization here is great. The other biggest help to me aside from the paper and the thesis was Ongaro's TLA+ spec: https://github.com/ongardie/raft.tl

Ben's visualization here is great. The other biggest help to me aside from the paper and the thesis was Ongaro's TLA+ spec: https://github.com/ongardie/raft.tla/blob/master/raft.tla https://github.com/ongardie/raft.tla/blob/master/raft.tla. It's the only super concise "implementation" I found that is free of production-grade tricks, optimizations, and abstractions. And for building an intuition, TigerBeetle's sim.tigerbeetle.com is great. What happens to consensus when there's high latency to disk or network? Or as processes crash more frequently? It demonstrates.