All articles
Jul 2, 20261 min readDistributed Systems

Understanding Raft Consensus

A concise introduction to leader election, log replication, and why Raft makes distributed consensus easier to understand.

Understanding Raft Consensus

Raft is one of the easiest consensus algorithms to understand.

Motivation

Consensus allows multiple machines to agree on the same value.

go
type Node struct {
    ID int
}

Leader Election

Only one leader exists at a time.

Log Replication

The leader replicates logs to followers.

Conclusion

Raft prioritizes understandability without sacrificing correctness.

Thanks for reading.

This is part of an ongoing notebook about building dependable systems and understanding the machinery beneath the abstractions.