Distributed consensus algorithms like Paxos and Raft provide an important building block for distributed systems, but there’s a lot more that goes into a resilient and scalable distributed database. CockroachDB’s key-value layer is built on many independent and overlapping Raft consensus groups. In this talk I’ll explain why we built it this way, and some of the expected and unexpected challenges we had to overcome along the way.

Bio:
Ben Darnell is the CTO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs where he works on the distributed consensus protocols that underpin its transactional model. He started his career at Google and then went on to a series of startups where he saw firsthand the need for better scalable storage systems.