Understanding Distributed Consensus Algorithms: A Deep Dive Into Paxos and Raft Architecture
Introduction In the world of modern computing, data is rarely stored on a single machine. Cloud services, micro‑service architectures, and globally replicated databases all rely on distributed systems—clusters of nodes that cooperate to provide fault‑tolerant, highly available services. At the heart of this cooperation lies a fundamental problem: how can a set of unreliable machines agree on a single value despite network failures, crashes, and message reordering? This is known as the distributed consensus problem. ...