If you want your system to operate even when network partitions happen or some instances of your service experience faults, you need a way for your instances to reach consensus. They must agree what values to commit and often in what order. A simple approach is by allowing each instance to vote on the correct state. However, in some cases this is not enough to reach a consensus correctly or at all. Another approach would be to elect a leader and let it propagate its value. Because it's not easy to implement such algorithms by hand, we'd recommend using popular industry-proven consensus protocols such as Paxos and Raft. The latter is growing in popularity as it is simpler and easier to understand.
Let's now discuss another way to prevent your system from faulting.
