Raft-C - Raft-Based Distributed System

This project explores various topics in the distributed systems domain, trying to keep it as small, simple and dependency-free as possible. Didactic in nature, it's not concerned with the latest frills (e.g. uses select as the main I/O mux) or rock solid features, improvements will come as it grows, with no specific goals other than keeping it simple enough.

Features

The software evolves and new features are added incrementally, at the current state:

• Raft Consensus for leader election and log replication
  • UDP-Based Transport for efficient communication
  • Pluggable serialization, defaulting to binary
• Consistent Hashing for sharding keys across nodes
  • Pluggable TCP / UDP transport protocol
  • Pluggable serialization, defaulting to binary
  • Mesh of nodes all connected, gossip protocol for larger clusters yet to be implemented
• Pluggable Storage Backend (SQLite, disk, etc.) (WIP)
• Static configuration files or override via flags (WIP)

Building the Project

Prerequisites

• gcc (or Clang)
• Make

Play

A crude bash script, for convenience, can be used to start 3 nodes with 2 replicas each, start_cluster.sh.

For the dull way, start each node with its own configuration based on its role in the cluster (dynamic discovery to be added), e.g.

Shard 0

./raft-c -c conf/node-0.conf

replica 0-0

./raft-c -c conf/raft-0-0.conf

replica 0-1

./raft-c -c conf/raft-0-1.conf