This is the first post in a multi-part series describing the Raft distributed consensus algorithm and its complete implementation in Go. Here is a complete list: Part 0: Introduction (this post) Part 1: Elections Part 2: Commands and log replication Part 3: Persistence and optimizations Part 4: Key/Value database Part 5: Exactly-once delivery Raft is a relatively new algorithm (2014), but it's already being used quite a bit in industry. The best known example is probably Kubernetes, which relie...