[dunkelheit]

Kudos to the raft authors for making distributed consensus accessible. Structuring the presentation in terms of RPCs and making the algorithm well-suited for implementing replicated state machines may not sound like a big deal, but those decisions really helped to make it approachable.

In a span of a decade consensus transformed from an esoteric algorithm that you can maaaaybe try implementing if you are a google engineer, to being widely deployed across many storage systems and readily accessible libraries and Raft played a big part in it.

[almostgotcaught]

> if you are a google engineer

Do people really have this kind of inferiority complex? What exactly do you think Google engineers are? People with 5 eyes and for hands with 10 fingers each? They read the papers (Paxos or whatever) struggle to understand it, implement beta versions, and iterate just like everyone else.

[eatonphil]

Anyone can implement Raft. There are plenty of implementations of them not by Google engineers, including a custom one in the product I work on. And developers in the Software Internals Discord are constantly in there asking questions on the road to implementing Raft or Viewstamped Replication.

[trenchpilgrim]

I believe the parent is referring to pre-raft consensus algorithms like Paxos. I recall the explanation of Paxos being a lengthy PDF while the explanation of Raft is a single webpage, mostly visual.