I ran into this while setting up Hashicorp Vault a year or two ago. It was good at helping me understand what's happening, but I don't particularly like raft. I want to be able to recover from one server, and I don't want to have to wait for a majority on every transaction should I add many servers. I know it's an impossible problem to solve generally, but I think in many situations an alert saying some specific data had a conflict and might not have been resolved correctly is a much better outcome than an outage.
If you don't want distributed consensus, don't use a distributed consensus algorithm. Raft/paxos is not the best fit for every problem, but for problems where you NEED to ensure consistency, it is the best tool for the job. And while it could have outage problems theoretically, Google's Chubby lock service, written using paxos, has such high availability in it's global instance, that the SRE's introduce artificial mini outages, just so dependent services don't assume it has a 100% SLA.
> Google's Chubby lock service, written using paxos, has such high availability in it's global instance, that the SRE's introduce artificial mini outages, just so dependent services don't assume it has a 100% SLA
