The Raft Consensus Algorithm: Leader Election and Log Replication Explained

Raft solves the hardest problem in distributed systems: keeping replicas synchronized while nodes fail. What We're Building We are dissecting the Raft consensus protocol to understand how a cluster maintains a single source of truth. Unlike Paxos, Raft is designed to be human-readable and easier to implement correctly. Our scope is not building a complete key-value store, but modeling the core state machine of a Raft node. We will focus on the three core roles, the heartbeat mechanism, and the s