Consensus
Raft Consensus: Leader and Followers in Plain English
A practical explanation of Raft consensus using leader election and replicated log commitment.
Replication
Quorum: Enough Votes to Trust the Answer
A simple explanation of quorum reads and writes through a three replica example.
CAP
Partition Tolerance: Keep Rules During a Split
What partition tolerance means in practice and how to design behavior for broken communication.
Ordering
Ordering: Decide What Happened First
How ordering rules prevent consumers and replicas from applying events in unsafe ways.
Failures
Network Partitions: Designing for Broken Links
A practical explanation of network partitions and why services need explicit rules when nodes cannot talk.
Cluster State
Membership: Who Is in the Cluster
Why cluster membership is a first class concept in distributed systems.
Ordering
Lamport Time: Ordering Without a Shared Clock
A simple explanation of Lamport time and how logical clocks help reason about event order.
Partitioning
Key Partitioning: Put Data in the Right Place
How key partitioning distributes data and load across nodes, and why the key choice matters.
Cluster Management
Join Protocols: How Nodes Enter a Cluster
How a new node joins a distributed cluster without receiving traffic too early.