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answer: direct
beat: system-design
source: 1 article · updated: September 1, 2026
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What's the difference between single-leader and multi-leader replication?

Single-leader replication routes all writes through one designated node, which then propagates changes to replicas — simple to reason about, since there's never a question of which write wins. Multi-leader replication allows writes to more than one node, useful for multi-region setups where each region wants local write latency, but it introduces the hard problem of resolving conflicting concurrent writes to the same data.

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Database Replication Explained: Single-Leader, Multi-Leader, and Leaderless

What replication lag actually breaks, and how single-leader, multi-leader, and leaderless models trade off consistency for availability.

Crashtech Editorial September 1, 2026 System Design & Architecture

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