[_vvhw]

I think the differences become more stark and more valuable/surprising the closer you get to understanding the protocols. There are some major availability and performance tradeoffs involved in the choice between Multi-Paxos and Raft, as you go from paper to production. This can be the difference between your cluster remaining available, and the loss of an entire cluster merely because of a latent sector error.

For example, UW-Madison's paper "Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage" [1] won best paper at Fast '18 and describes simple scenarios where an entire LogCabin, Raft, Kafka or Zookeeper cluster can become unavailable far too soon, or even suffer global cluster data loss.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast18/presentation/alagap...