Raft Visualization

Visualization author here. Cool to see it get some HN love despite being six years old.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;m glad folks are still getting value out of the Raft visualization. The paper is good but it helps to see data move over time to really make it click.

MIT online trainig has this great YouTube playlist on distributed systems, with one of the lectures being on RAFT [1,2,3]. The entire playlist [4] is probably worth your time, though.<p>[1] Intro <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UzzcUS2OHqo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UzzcUS2OHqo</a><p>[2] Part I: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=64Zp3tzNbpE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=64Zp3tzNbpE</a><p>[3] Part II <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4r8Mz3MMivY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4r8Mz3MMivY</a><p>[4] Playlist for the course: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cQP8WApzIQQ&amp;list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbsvGQk9_UB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cQP8WApzIQQ&amp;list=PLrw6a1wE39...</a>

I don&#x27;t have any particular use for this right now but the visualization is so good that I actually followed along and get what it&#x27;s about. Pretty obvious to say but it&#x27;s super cool and I wish more projects had this kind of quick intro&#x2F;overview.

I&#x27;d appreciate it if that presentation UI allowed to go back a step.

What are of the shelve solutions when it comes to actually using these protocols? Implementing these in-house doesn&#x27;t make sense to me.

I can only recommend the &#x27;Distributed systems for fun and profit&#x27; book as a follow up to this neat visualisation.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;book.mixu.net&#x2F;distsys&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;book.mixu.net&#x2F;distsys&#x2F;</a>

How does Raft handle the scenario where there’s a network split, Client One updates a value on the majority, and then Client Two attempts to read the value from the minority side?

I would have killed for this in my advanced distributed systems class in university..

Why RAFT is better? In other words, why do we need a concept of a leader?

Very useful for understanding the protocol including edge cases.

So Raft is single leader but Paxos is leaderless?