Raft is a consensus algorithm used in distributed systems to ensure that data is replicated safely and consistently. That sentence alone can be confusing. Hopefully the analogy in this post can help people understand how it works. In honor of national Mean Girls day (“on October 3rd he asked me what day it was”), I present the Raft Consensus Algorithm as explained through the movie Mean Girls. (For a great, more technical overview of Raft, we recommend The Secret Lives of Data).

Titanic is a 1997 Oscar-winning film starring Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (who will from now on be referred to as K8 Winslet) in a love story aboard the ill-fated Titanic ship. As we know, the Titanic was an “unsinkable ship” - the largest ship in the world at that time - yet it sank mere days into its maiden voyage, costing the lives of 1500 people on board when it hit an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. I want to reimagine the ending of the Titanic, both the ship’s ending and the film’s. We’re going to look at the story through the lens of Kubernetes and distributed database technology to see how the story could have ended happily.