Fast and fault-tolerant: pick two

Matt Barrett, Founder and CEO of Adaptive, discusses the development of Aeron Cluster, Adaptive’s Raft consensus implementation.

Matt lays out the optimizations Adaptive made in the Raft algorithm, including replicating individual bytes instead of messages, implementing asynchronous parallelized operations with multicast, adding canvassing stages to prevent election stalls, enabling pauseless snapshots, and incorporating single-threaded state machine replication for deterministic performance.

The presentation covers the technical challenges, architectural decisions, performance benchmarks showing 40-microsecond P99 latency at 500K messages/second, and discusses extensions they built on top of Aeron Cluster including a sequencer for decoupled application development while maintaining performance guarantees.