Raft vs paxos

Table of Contents

Raft Visualization

Here’s a Raft cluster running in your browser. You can interact with it to see Raft in action. Five servers are shown on the left, and their logs are shown on the right. We hope to create a screencast soon to explain what’s going on. This visualization (RaftScope) is still pretty rough around the edges; pull requests would be very welcome.

The Secret Lives of Data is a different visualization of Raft. It’s more guided and less interactive, so it may be a gentler starting point.

Publications

This is “the Raft paper”, which describes Raft in detail: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version) by Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout. A slightly shorter version of this paper received a Best Paper Award at the 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

Talks

Courses teaching Raft

This is a list of courses that include lectures or programming assignments on Raft. This might be useful for other instructors and for online learners looking for materials. If you know of additional courses, please submit a pull request or an issue to update it.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, CS425: Distributed Systems, Indranil Gupta, Nikita Borisov, and Radhika Mittal. Includes Raft programming assignment in Go. (Spring 2021, …)
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, CSCI4160: Distributed and Parallel Computing (Private), Eric Lo. Includes lecture on Paxos and Raft as well as Raft programming assignment in Java/Go (Fall 2019, Spring 2021, …)
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, COL 819: Distributed Systems, Smruti R. Sarangi. Includes lecture on Raft (video) (PPTX) (Winter 2020, …)
Carnegie Mellon University, CS 440: Distributed Systems, Yuvraj Agarwal, Dave Andersen. Includes Raft programming assignment in Go. (Fall 2019, …)
Northeastern University, CS 3700: Networks and Distributed Systems, Christo Wilson, Long Lu. Includes an assignment to build a replicated key-value store based on the Raft protocol. (Fall 2018, …)
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, CS 403: Programming Language Paradigms, Buffalo Hewner. Includes Raft programming assignment in Erlang (assignments). (Winter 2017, …)
Princeton University, COS-418: Distributed Systems, Mike Freedman and Kyle Jamieson. Includes lecture on Raft (PPTX) and programming assignments to build a Raft-based key-value store. (Fall 2016, …)
University of Washington, CSE 452: Distributed Systems, Tom Anderson. Includes lecture on Raft, though they call it Paxos. (Winter 2016, …)
University of Colorado, Boulder, CSCI 5673: Distributed Systems, Shivakant Mishra. Includes assignment to download a Raft implementation and build a fault-tolerant data structure with it. (Fall 2015, …)
University of Utah, CS 6963: Distributed Systems, Ryan Stutsman (@rstutsman). Will include something about Raft (TBD). (Fall 2015, …)
San Jose State University, CMPE 275 Enterprise Application Development, John Gash. Includes project to make a distributed filesystem using Raft. (Spring 2015, …)
Brown, CS 138: Distributed Computer Systems, Tom Doeppner, Rodrigo Fonseca (@rodrigo_fonseca). Includes Raft programming assignment in Go. (Spring 2015, …)
MIT, 6.824: Distributed Systems, Robert Morris. Includes lecture on Raft (lecture notes). See Jon Gjengset’s posts for instructors and students. (Spring 2015, …)
University of San Francisco, CS 636: Graduate Operating Systems, Greg Benson (@gregorydbenson). Includes lecture on Raft. (Spring 2015, …)
Harvard, CS 261: Research Topics in Operating Systems, Margo Seltzer. Includes lecture on Raft (lecture notes). (Fall 2014, …)
University of Houston, COSC 6360: Operating Systems, Jehan-François Pâris (@jehanfrancois). Includes lecture on Raft (PPT). (Fall 2014, …)
Stanford, CS 244b: Distributed Systems, Dawson Engler, David Mazières (@dmazieres). Included guest lecture on Raft by Diego Ongaro. Several students chose to work on Raft-based final projects. (Fall 2014)
NUST-SEECS, CS 332: Distributed Computing, Tahir Azim (@TahirAzim). Includes lecture on Raft based on user study materials (tweet). (Fall 2014, …)
Duke, CPS 512: Distributed Systems, Bruce Maggs. Includes guest lecture on Raft (PPTX) by Landon Cox (@lpcox). (Spring 2014, Spring 2015, …)
IIT Bombay, CS 733: Cloud Computing, Sriram Srinivasan. Includes Raft programming assignment in Go (assignments). (Spring 2014, Spring 2015, …)

Where can I ask questions?

The best place to ask questions about Raft and its implementations is the raft-dev Google group. Some of the implementations also have their own mailing lists; check their READMEs.

Where can I get Raft?

There are many implementations of Raft available in various stages of development. This table lists the implementations we know about with source code available. The most popular and/or recently updated implementations are towards the top. This information will inevitably get out of date; please submit a pull request or an issue to update it.

Stars Name Primary Authors Language License Leader Election + Log Replication? Persistence? Membership Changes? Log Compaction?

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Raft Visualization

Publications

Talks

Courses teaching Raft

Where can I ask questions?

Where can I get Raft?

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