Paxos/Raft Consensus

Computer Science

How It Works

The Raft consensus protocol orchestrates fault-tolerant, consistent state machine replication across distributed computing clusters. A recognized Leader accepts client update proposals and multicasts AppendEntries remote procedure calls to Follower replicas. Once a proposed entry is logged by a strict majority quorum of servers, it is marked committed and executed into the state machine, guaranteeing strict safety under network partitions.

Governing Equation
Quorum = ⌊ N / 2 ⌋ + 1 , Commit(i) ⟺ ∑_{k=1}^N I_{match(k, i)} ≥ Quorum