[benbjohnson]

I'm the original author of go-raft (the implementation used in etcd) so I'll try to address some of the points in this thread.

Raft only updates the state of the system once log entries are committed to a quorum the local state will never be rolled back. Log entries can be thrown out but they haven't been committed to the local state so it doesn't matter.

You can read from the leader if you need to ensure linearizability but that will kill your read scaling. Another approach is to read locally and check that the local raft node isn't in a "candidate" state (which would mean that it hasn't received a heartbeat from the master within the last 150ms). That approach works for a lot of cases.

As far as implementing multi-paxos, the authors behind Google Chubby have talked about how there is a large divide between theoretical multi-paxos and actually implementing multi-paxos. Also, there aren't any standalone multi-paxos Go libraries available. I wrote go-raft at the time because there wasn't an alternative distributed consensus library in Go at the time.

Let me know if you need an extra pair of eyes on your Raft implementation or if you have any questions ([e-mail]).