Lamport's 1978 "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System". The Raft dissertation never really explains why using a logical clock is the critical, central thing. It just glosses over it.
And then read Lampson's 1996 "How to Build a Highly Available System Using Consensus". It will teach you how to prove equivalence of your variation back to an established, proven model. It is very clearly written.
Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41669850 - Sept 2024 (87 comments)
The Raft Consensus Algorithm (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37369826 - Sept 2023 (76 comments)
Implementing a distributed key-value store on top of implementing Raft in Go - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36070426 - May 2023 (79 comments)
Strong Consistency with Raft and SQLite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35246228 - March 2023 (42 comments)
Raft Is So Fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through Mean Girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33071069 - Oct 2022 (53 comments)
Raft Consensus Animated (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32484584 - Aug 2022 (67 comments)
Why use Paxos instead of Raft? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32467962 - Aug 2022 (45 comments)
In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (2014) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29837995 - Jan 2022 (12 comments)
Raft Consensus Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29079079 - Nov 2021 (51 comments)
Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27831576 - July 2021 (48 comments)
In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (2014) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23113419 - May 2020 (26 comments)
Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22994420 - April 2020 (65 comments)
Raft Is So Fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through Mean Girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22520040 - March 2020 (4 comments)
In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14724883 - July 2017 (14 comments)
Raft Consensus Algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9613493 - May 2015 (24 comments)
The Raft Consensus Algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527440 - Oct 2014 (27 comments)
Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271957 - Sept 2014 (79 comments)