I’ve heard multiple times that a strong notion of leadership somehow simplifies replication. I don’t think this is true. I explain why in this post. In a prior post, we described the State Machine Replication (or SMR) abstraction. The SMR API allows you to propose commands and play them back in a total order. In another post, we described how SMR can be implemented either directly using RPC (e.g., as in Raft or Viewstamped Replication) or via intermediate abstractions like a shared log or a proc...