Leader election
Picking exactly one node as the coordinator.
Origin
Lynch et al. formalised leader-election in distributed systems in the 1980s. Practical implementations come from Paxos (1989), ZooKeeper Atomic Broadcast (2010), and Raft (2014).
Where it shows up in production
- etcd Raft-based leader. Leader election triggers on heartbeat timeout (150ms default).
- Kubernetes controllers Use a Lease object in etcd as a distributed lock for active-active-with-leader patterns.
- ZooKeeper Ephemeral sequential znodes — the lowest-numbered live node is the leader.
On Semicolony
Sources & further reading
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