Why did Chubby (Google) stick with Paxos instead of switching to Raft?
Chubby's Paxos implementation (Multi-Paxos) was battle-tested over years and underpinned Google's infrastructure. Rewriting it would risk production systems. Raft's advantage is strongest for NEW systems where you can bake comprehensibility into the design from the start, not retrofitting it into a working system.
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.
Read the full analysisOther questions this article answers
More system design questions
- Why does an index's internal data structure matter if it all ends up 'faster than a scan'?
- Why is disk I/O the thing index structures are actually optimizing for?
- Why can't a hash index handle range queries?
- What makes a bitmap index different from a B-tree, and when is it better?
- Why do B-trees stay balanced automatically as data is inserted?
- Why does a database need an index at all — why can't it just scan the table?
- When is a hash index better than a B-tree index?
- What is a composite index and why does column order matter?
Every answer on Crashtech is written by the editor of the article it comes from — never auto-summarised. Browse all answers or the System Design beat.