Papers We Love Too

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Main: Peter Corless on "In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm"

Abstract: Raft is a consensus algorithm for managing a replicated log. It produces a result equivalent to (multi-)Paxos, and it is as efficient as Paxos, but its structure is different from Paxos; this makes Raft more understandable than Paxos and also provides a better foundation for building practical systems. In order to enhance understandability, Raft separates the key elements of consensus, such as leader election, log replication, and safety, and it enforces a stronger degree of coherency to reduce the number of states that must be considered. Results from a user study demonstrate that Raft is easier for students to learn than Paxos. Raft also includes a new mechanism for changing the cluster membership, which uses overlapping majorities to guarantee safety.

Bio: Peter Corless is a Principal Product Marketing Manager at Redpanda Data, where he focuses on bringing AI, data streaming, and analytical services to market. Before Redpanda, Peter has worked across a broad spectrum of the data industry over the past decade - including distributed OLTP and OLAP databases, both SQL and NoSQL. In 2025, he wrote an O’Reilly book on Open Source Observability.

Mini: Rohan Puri on "Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?"

Abstract: Distributed consensus is a fundamental primitive for constructing fault-tolerant, strongly-consistent distributed systems. Though many distributed consensus algorithms have been proposed, just two dominate production systems: Paxos, the traditional, famously subtle, algorithm; and Raft, a more recent algorithm positioned as a more understandable alternative to Paxos. In this paper, we consider the question of which algorithm, Paxos or Raft, is the better solution to distributed consensus…We find that both Paxos and Raft take a very similar approach to distributed consensus, differing only in their approach to leader election…We surmise that much of the understandability of Raft comes from the paper's clear presentation rather than being fundamental to the underlying algorithm being presented.

Bio: Rohan Puri is a Senior Staff Engineer at DDN working on DDN Infinia. He has 15+ years of experience building and optimizing file systems and distributed storage systems, and has contributed to storage systems at Samsung, Veritas, Oracle, and several startups. He also serves as Industry Co-Chair at MSST and on the Advisory Board of the Future Memory Storage conference.

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