I really enjoyed this transcript of a talk. It’s an exploration of the design space of distributed consensus by Alex Miller, who I first came across several years ago when Cloudant were looking at FoundationDB; Alex was one of the primary authors. He knows his stuff. There are several great papers linked in the post.
This talk is an extension of my earlier Data Replication Design Spectrum blog post. The blog post was the analysis of the various replication algorithms, which concludes with showing that Raft has no particular advantage along any easy analyze/theoretical dimension. This builds on that argument to try and persuade you out of using Raft and to supply suggestions on how to work around the downsides of quorum-based or reconfiguration-based replication which makes people shy away from them.