What are terms and election timeouts in Raft?
Terms are monotonically increasing logical clocks that mark election rounds. When a leader fails, followers detect it via heartbeat timeout (a randomized interval). Any follower can become a candidate and request votes for the new term, forcing stale leaders to step down.
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Why Raft Consensus Prevents Split-BrainRaft ensures only one partition can reach quorum, making split-brain impossible. Writes commit to majorities. Powers etcd and CockroachDB.
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