[setr]

I just mean that RAFT nodes are already read-only for most of their lives — it’s not clear to me why you’d want nodes to be dedicated as read-only; it would only reduce consistency guarantees (and I believe you wouldn’t be avoiding the heartbeat and data consistency network chatter).. I think the leadership functionality comes cheap

[zellyn]

That makes sense. I need to read up on Raft again.

I know Zookeeper, for example, supports observer nodes: essentially a cheaper read-only cache. Chubby at Google had the same thing.