Consider a group of friends planning a weekend outing. To make the trip successful, they need consensus on the location, schedule, and budget. Typically, one person is chosen as the leader — responsible for decisions, tracking expenses, and keeping everyone informed, including any new members who join later. If the leader steps down, the group elects another to maintain continuity.
In distributed computing, clusters of servers face a similar challenge — they must agree on shared state and decisions. This is achieved through Consensus Protocols. Among the most well-known are Viewstamped Replication (VSR), Zookeeper Atomic Broadcast (ZAB), Paxos, and Raft. In this article, we will explore Raft — designed to be more understandable while ensuring reliability in distributed systems.