Raft itself is very nice, and the paper
https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...
Does an excellent job in explaining it, but
I have some problems with this claim:
"A user study with 43 students
at two universities shows that Raft is significantly easier
to understand than Paxos: after learning both algorithms,
33 of these students were able to answer questions about
Raft better than questions about Paxos".
Honestly, what I think happened is this: They first explained paxos to the poor students, then asked questions.
In a later session explained Raft and asked questions.
Can't it be the students started processing the problem of distributed consensus between the sessions so they got a better grasp of the topic? This would mean paxos helped them understand raft better.
Anyway I'm nitpicking etc etc.
Honestly, what I think happened is this: They first explained paxos to the poor students, then asked questions. In a later session explained Raft and asked questions. Can't it be the students started processing the problem of distributed consensus between the sessions so they got a better grasp of the topic? This would mean paxos helped them understand raft better. Anyway I'm nitpicking etc etc.