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Arpit Bhayani Blogs
001 Ai Topological Sort

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TLDR: Why Distributed Systems Need Consensus Algorithms Like Raft

Date: 2025-09-06 Source: https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/why-consensus

Overview

Everything we interact with today is a "distributed system". From microservices to cloud-native applications, from databases to message queues. We are constantly building systems that span multiple machines.

Key Points

  • Everything we interact with today is a “distributed system”.
  • Why Agreement is Hard: It Does Seem Simple At first glance, getting multiple machines to agree seems straightforward.
  • What Consensus Algorithms Actually Solve: The Core Guarantee: Safety and Liveness Consensus algorithms (like Paxos or Raft) provide two fundamental guarantees Safety: Nothing bad ever happens.
  • Real-World Scenarios: Where Consensus is Critical: Distributed Databases Leader Election for Primary-Replica Systems Databases like PostgreSQL with streaming replication need to elect a primary after the current primary fails.
001-ai-topological-sort.md
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002 Temporal Primer
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003 Rag Production
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004 Structure Of Llm Chat
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005 How Llms Work
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006 Monolith Is Distributed System
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007 Defensive Databases
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008 Bm25
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009 Join Algorithms
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010 Venting At Work
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011 Half Life
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012 Multi Paxos
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013 Mysql Replication Internals
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014 Bloom Filters
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015 Clock Sync Nightmare
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016 Kafka Partitions
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017 Product Quantization
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018 Qkv Matrices
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019 Deleted Production
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020 How Llm Inference Works
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021 Blocking Queues
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022 Heartbeats In Distributed Systems
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023 Cassandra Writes
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024 Redis Replication
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028 Emotions At Work
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029 Grpc Http2
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030 Meetings With No Agenda Are A Waste Of Time
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033 Stay Relevant At Higher Salary Levels
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034 Why Consensus
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035 Database Deadlocks
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036 Cpu Cache Locality
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037 Eventual Consistency
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038 Dns Udp Tcp
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039 Masters
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040 Empathy Makes Great Engineers Unstoppable
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041 Good Mentors Build People
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042 Always Have Back Burner Projects
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043 Before You Push Back Know What Youre Standing On
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044 Be The One They Can Count On
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047 Dont Let Your Best Ideas Die In Silence
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048 Be Someone Others Want To Work With
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049 Dont Fall For Xy Problem Ask Right Questions
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050 Biggest Lie Startups Tell Engineers
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051 Promotions Are Proactive Not Reactive
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053 No One Ships Alone
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057 Experience Before Forming Opinion
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073 Shiny Object Syndrome In Tech
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074 3p
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075 Leverage The Equilibrium
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076 On Demand Container Loading In Aws Lambda
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077 Sql Has Problems We Can Fix Them Pipe Syntax In Sql
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078 Nanolog A Nanosecond Scale Logging System
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079 Best Resource Is Mythical
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080 Wtf The Who To Follow Service At Twitter
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081 Know A Lot
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085 Culture Fit
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086 Quantification In Resume
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087 Hiring Is Unfair
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088 Questions For Interviewers
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089 Collaboration Communication
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090 Out Of Vicious Interview Cycle
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091 Pitch Projects Not Ideas
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100 Keep Yourself Unblocked
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101 Genetic Knapsack
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102 Pseudorandom Number Generation Lfsr
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103 How Indexes Work On Partitioned And Sharded Data
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104 Some Data Partitioning Strategies For Distributed Data Stores
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105 Data Partitioning
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106 Leaderless Replication
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107 Conflict Resolution
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108 Conflict Detection
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109 Multi Master Replication
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110 Monotonic Reads
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111 Read Your Write Consistency
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112 Handling Outages Master Replica
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113 Replication Formats
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114 Replication Strategies
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115 Master Replica Replication
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116 Durability
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117 Isolation
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118 Atomicity
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119 Consistency
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120 Architectures In Distributed Systems
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121 Mistaken Beliefs Of Distributed Systems
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122 Fork Bomb
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124 Taxonomy On Sql
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126 Fully Persistent Arrays
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127 Persistent Data Structures Introduction
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128 Constant Folding Python
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129 String Interning Python
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130 Recursion Visualizer Python
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132 2q Cache
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133 Israeli Queues
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134 1d Terrain
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136 Ts Smoothing
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137 Lfu
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139 Slowsort
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140 Bitcask
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142 10x Engineer
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144 Decipher Single Xor
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145 Python Iterable Integers
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147 Rum
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148 Consistent Hashing
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149 Python Caches Integers
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153 Fsm Python
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154 Bayesian Average
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155 Sliding Window Ratelimiter
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156 Idf
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157 Better Programmer
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158 Python Prompts
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159 Rule 30 Cellular Automata
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160 Function Overloading
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161 Isolation Forest
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162 Image Steganography
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163 Long Integers Python
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164 I Changed My Python
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165 Benchmark And Compare Pagination Approach In Mongodb
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166 Mongodb Cursor Skip Is Slow
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167 Fast And Efficient Pagination In Mongodb
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168 Making Http Requests Using Netcat
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  • Footnotes: Consensus algorithms like Raft are the foundation of reliable distributed systems.

    • Takeaway

    Consensus algorithms like Raft are the foundation of reliable distributed systems.