Peter Corless on Raft

This event is also on Luma.

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; an