Consensus

etcd sits at the heart of Kubernetes. Before your applications run, etcd is storing cluster state, coordinating elections, and replicating data. It consumes 2-8 GB RAM per node. It requires 3-5 nodes for high availability. That’s 6-40 GB RAM just for cluster coordination. Most teams don’t need distributed consensus. Most teams don’t need high availability at the cluster level. Most teams are running small clusters that would work fine with a single node and backups. ...

Most Raft implementations look great in theory and fall apart in practice. The algorithm itself isn’t the problem—it’s everything around the algorithm that breaks in production: bootstrapping, discovery, leader routing, rejoin behavior, and what happens when nodes start out of order or the network is unreliable. Taubyte’s Raft wraps HashiCorp Raft and adapts it with libp2p transport, Taubyte discovery, and datastore-backed persistence. The goal isn’t to reinvent consensus—it’s to make consensus operable. Nodes can start in any order and converge to a working cluster without static seed lists or fragile bootstrap rituals. This article explores how Taubyte’s Raft addresses the operational challenges that make Kubernetes/etcd fragile and compares it to typical Raft libraries.