FlowG – Distributed Systems without raft (part 2)

david-delassus.medium.com

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Author ditched Raft because it can only have one leader. But Raft has many leaders, one per partition. After reading the article I’m not sure author knows what they are doing.

Emphasis on "one per partition", which if I understand correctly as "network partition", means that in the absence of network partition, there is one leader.

I do have only a surface understanding of Raft, and I'm learning while doing yes.

In Raft state space is split into partitions. Each partition gets it leader. For example in a cluster of 3 nodes and 65536 partitions each node is a leader for 1/3 of partitions with two others acting as replicas. This way each node simultaneously leader for some partitions and replica for others.

Gotcha, thank you for the clarification.

I'd add though, that the "one leader" thing was not the only reason why I ditched Raft. The Go library hashicorp/raft was quite complex to use, and I've had a lot of situations where the cluster failed to elect a leader, and ending up with a corrupted state.

This might be a PEBKAC issue of course.

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