RAFT: Implementing Distributed Consensus with Erlang
Increasingly systems are required to include ideas from distributed systems to achieve their goals of availability, performance and maintenance. As people dive into the distributed systems literature, they often have problems with finding practical information about building distributed systems. With this in mind, RAFT is an algorithm for providing distributed consensus that focuses on providing an understandable and more easily implemented solution for people building distributed systems.
Erlang/OTP is programming languages that focuses on concurrency, fault tolerance and building massively scalable soft real-time systems. It’s only natural we’d want to build a distributed algorithm with such a language.
In this talk we’ll look at:
- the need for distributed consensus,
- understand how RAFT works, and
- show how RAFT can be implemented in Erlang/OTP