Raft Visualization

Author here. I made this visualization over a decade ago and I'm glad it's still useful for folks! Let me know if you have any questions. I've also been trying on-and-off again some different techniques for doing the visualization as I'd like to do more of these. I'm currently looking at trying to make it work with Remotion[1]. The JavaScript version I did for Raft was time intensive and I ended up having to write an entire (albeit terrible) implementation…

Visualization author here. Cool to see it get some HN love despite being six years old. Unfortunately, the visualization project is effectively dead. The Raft visualization involved a lot of painful D3.js coding and effectively writing a JS Raft implementation. In hindsight, a deterministic format would be much easier. I toyed around with learning After Effects in hopes of producing some other visualization videos but I never did finish any. I'm glad folks are still getting value out of the…

I am in the minority who thinks Raft is overrated. I tried teaching Raft one year instead of Paxos but ended up switching back. While it was much easier to understand how to implement Raft, I think my students gained deeper insight when focusing on single-decision Paxos. There is a lightbulb moment when they first understand that consensus is a property of the system that happens first (and they can point at the moment it happens) and then the nodes…

In the example with 5 nodes and a split, it is my understanding that the two nodes can't elect a leader. While the candidate in the smaller split receives votes from a majority of the split, there is no true majority, so no leader. The cluster is configured with the total number of nodes. What could happen is that an already elected leader continues to think it's the leader for a while while the rest fo the cluster elects a…