[hinkley]

One of the big gaps in Raft is that it’s hard to manage leader election on a heterogenous network. Everyone has or knows a story about the tiny branch office we keep for the CTO’s nephew or that engineer who decided to move to Colorado and quit if he couldn’t work from there, getting elected leader and the whole system limping to a halt.

In the case of Raft it would benefit I think from having an instant runoff election process. Where three nodes are nominated and everyone votes on which one has the best visibility.

At the very least I can see a way to use latency to determine who to vote for, to manage a fast election instead of timeouts and retries.

[grogers]

If a node thinks it's better suited as leader, it can always force an election immediately for the next term. Things could go badly if you're wrong though

[hinkley]

There are variants that have members than can vote but can’t lead, and I believe also ones where there are silent shareholders that are aware of part of the state of the system but don’t vote. Those would be particularly useful for autoscaling groups, where you’re not affecting the quorum count.

I think consul’s sidecar works this way but I’ve ever set it up, only used it.