This is a dummy post so the design has something to render. Delete it when the real writing starts.
Raft’s core trick is that it makes consensus legible. Where Paxos is a proof that happens to be an algorithm, Raft is an algorithm designed to be taught: leader election, log replication, and safety, each of which can be held in your head separately.
A few things that stuck:
- The election timeout randomization is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
- Log matching is an invariant, not a mechanism — the mechanism is just “reject if the previous entry doesn’t match.”
- Snapshotting is where the clean story meets the messy world.
More once I’ve actually implemented it.