Consensus, Leader Election & Locks

Advanced · 22 min read · High-Level Design, Distributed Systems Theory

Raft, ZooKeeper/etcd, leases, fencing tokens, gossip and failure detection.

This is an Advanced lesson, part of Premium. What it covers:

• What consensus provides
• Majorities (quorums)
• Raft in brief
• Coordination services
• Leader election in your own services
• Distributed locks
• Membership and failure detection
• When you don't need consensus
• Interview questions
• Practice
• Further reading

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