[krenoten]

These consensus algorithms are awesome! They are the backbones of many highly available systems in modern DC's today. It's how people manage to get any sleep at all when taking care of systems that require very reliable databases.

Raft is a consensus algorithm that is touted as being easy to understand. It is well specified, compared to paxos, which leaves many implementation details up to the creator. Raft, however, is fairly explicitly specified on page 4 of this paper: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf

Consensus algorithms allow us to build reliable castles out of constantly failing servers (sand). Systems like zookeeper, etcd, chubby, consul, and others use these algorithms to achieve high availability AND strong consistency (linearizability, the strongest possible) despite up to a majority of the cluster failing.

[krenoten]

Whoops, I meant to say "up to the largest minority failing", if a majority is lost then the gig is up! Too late to edit!