Raft? The two most prominent consensus algorithms that I usually come across in 'the wild', are Paxos and Raft. Am I missing something -- or is the article missing something?
As it pertains to reaching consensus, everything in the "Basic Paxos" section of the article is the same for Raft as it is Paxos. Raft can be seen as instance of Paxos with different terminology and prescribed solutions for leader elections, solving dueling leader issues, and persisting past outcomes.
Here's a nice paper on this that dives deeper into the matter and also shows how Paxos can be just as "understandable" as Raft with a few vocabulary changes: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05074.pdf
Yes. Raft is in the basic category called Multi-Paxos, but with specific choices intended to make the algorithm more comprehensible and less error prone to implement. Looks like there's substance to that view as well, looking at both the literature and practice.
A more recent development is Heidi Howard's work, which provides a framework for thinking about the whole category of Paxos algorithms that many of us find a lot more approachable.
Some people don’t like it when you say that, but yes. I don’t mean to downplay Raft’s significance because its better perceived understandability helped bring a good algorithm to much more popularity, maybe even nudged future researchers to think about the “user experience” of their discoveries (not to say that Leslie Lamport wasn’t, he did try very hard with metaphors in The Part-time Parliament).
