Distributed Systems Series — Part 4.5: Fault Tolerance & High Availability Detection Is Not Recovery Post 4.4 established how distributed systems detect failures — through heartbeats, timeouts, phi accrual detectors, and gossip protocols. Detection is the prerequisite. But detecting that a node has failed solves nothing by itself. The system must then do something about … Read more
Paxos vs Raft explained — how both consensus algorithms work, why Paxos is hard to implement, how Raft’s leader election and log replication work step by step, and why Raft dominates production systems like etcd, CockroachDB, and TiKV.
Coordination services provide strong consistency and fault tolerance for leader election, locks, and configuration in distributed systems.
Coordination allows distributed systems to serialize access, elect leaders, and maintain correctness despite failures and unreliable time.