Enable Fault Tolerance and Failure Detection

Handle temporary failures

Many distributed systems use a strict read/write quorum, where an operation must receive responses from a minimum number of replicas before it can proceed. If enough replicas are unavailable and the quorum cannot be satisfied, the operation fails, reducing availability. To maintain availability during such failures, the system can use a sloppy quorum.

In a sloppy quorum, the first$\text{n}$healthy nodes from the preference list handle read and write operations. These nodes may not be the designated owners in the consistent hash ring, but they ensure the request is processed.

Example: Consider a configuration where $\text{n = 3}$. If Node $\text{A}$ is unavailable during a write, the request is sent to the next healthy node, Node $\text{D}$ ...