Is Raft actually simpler than Paxos, or just a repackaging?
Raft is not simpler in theory — both guarantee safety and liveness for the same failure model. The simplification is structural. Paxos leaves leader election, membership, and log format unspecified, so every implementation invented its own rules, creating divergence and hidden bugs. Raft specifies all three explicitly, so implementations converge.
Answered in
Why Raft Won: Consensus Built for HumansPaxos is correct but hard to understand; Raft made consensus explicit. Same guarantees, different adoption. Why comprehensibility matters in algorithms.
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