Leader or Majority: Why have one when you can have both? Improving Read Scalability in Raft-like consensus protocols

Consensus protocols are used to provide consistency guarantees over replicated data in a distributed system, and allow a set of replicas to work together as a coherent group. Raft is a consensus protocol that is designed to be easy to understand and implement. It is equivalent to Multi-Paxos in fault-tolerance and performance. It uses a leader based approach for coordinating replication to a majority. The leader regularly informs the followers of its existence using heartbeats. All reads and writes go through the leader to ensure strong consistency. However, read-heavy workloads increase load on the leader since the followers in Raft are maintained as cold standbys. Since the algorithm itself guarantees replication to at least a majority, why not exploit this fact to serve strongly consistent reads without a leader? We propose mechanisms to use quorum reads in Raft to offload the leader and better utilize the cluster. We integrate our approach in CockroachDB, an open-source distributed SQL database which uses Raft and leader leases, to compare our proposed changes. The evaluation results with the YCSB benchmark illustrate that quorum reads result in an increased throughput of the system under read-heavy workloads, as well as lower read/write latencies.