Build Your Own Raft

The board that names what a group of machines can still promise each other when the network cannot be trusted. This build is the working program behind its “vote underneath” half. Sits at the head of the Raft series, after the Distributed Scheduler build.

Before you start. This series builds a small copy of a consensus system: a group of five programs that keep one identical list of commands, even when some of them crash or lose contact with the rest. You do not need to have read a consensus paper. You do need two ideas from earlier lessons. Who holds the pen (consensus & Raft) explains why one machine at a time should be allowed to write, and Consistency and Consensus gives the guarantee a group of machines can offer in return. Scheduler 04: Leader Election shows what a project does when it leans on such a group without building one. The build format is the one from Build Your Own Database - From Scratch: one Go module, one directory per stage, and a test next to every stage.