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System Design Deep Dive: Real-World Distributed Systems

Raft's Leader Election Protocol

Learn how Raft's leader election protocol maintains consistency and reliability in distributed systems. This lesson explains the transition from follower to candidate, the voting process, and how leaders are chosen or elections are retried to avoid split votes.

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Leader election

All servers start as followers in Raft. A server keeps this state as long as it receives valid heartbeat RPCs (AppendEntries RPCs with no log entries) from the leader, which the leader uses to ascertain its authority. As soon as a follower stops receiving these heartbeat RPCs for a specific time duration, known as election timeout, it assumes that there is no valid leader currently. It changes its state to a ...