Why Raft-native systems are the future of streaming data

Consensus is fundamental to consistent, distributed systems. In order to guarantee system availability in the event of inevitable crashes, systems need a way to ensure that each node in the cluster is in alignment, such that work can seamlessly transition between nodes in the case of failures. Consensus protocols such as Paxos, Raft, and View Stamped Replication (VSR) help to drive resiliency for distributed systems by providing the logic for processes like leader election, atomic configuration changes, synchronization, and more.

As with all design elements, the different approaches to distributed consensus offer different trade-offs. Paxos is the oldest consensus protocol around and is used in many systems like Google Cloud Spanner, Apache Cassandra, Amazon DynamoDB, and Neo4j. Paxos achieves consensus in a three-phased, leaderless, majority-wins protocol. While Paxos is effective in driving correctness, it is notoriously difficult to understand, implement, and reason about. This is partly because it obscures many of the challenges in reaching consensus (e.g. leader election, reconfiguration), making it difficult to decompose into subproblems.

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Author: . [Source Link (*), InfoWorld]

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