2 comments
I really enjoy when it when someone injects a dose of "wacky" into something that is taken more or less for granted (Raft) to challenge the standard way of thinking about it.<p>This article flipped my understanding of split-brain or network partitions on its head: You don't actually have to have a majority to ensure progress, you just have to design your quorum selection criteria in such a way that no other partition believes they are authoritative, and these finite projection planes are an interesting way of proving that (with caveats).
excellent article.<p>> The key correctness insight is this: any two majorities of nodes must overlap in at least one node. So between any two consecutive global state changes — whether two commits, two leader elections, or one of each — at least one node participated in both.<p>intuitively makes sense, but would be nice to see this result explicitly derived or illustrated the same way the fano planes were.