On the Parallels between Paxos and Raft, and how to Port Optimizations

In recent years, Raft has surpassed Paxos to become the more popular consensus protocol in the industry. While many researchers have observed the similarities between the two protocols, no one has shown how Raft and Paxos are formally related to each other. In this paper, we present a formal mapping between Raft and Paxos, and use this knowledge to port a certain class of optimizations from Paxos to Raft. In particular, our porting method can automatically generate an optimized protocol specification with guaranteed correctness. As case studies, we port and evaluate two optimizations, Mencius and Paxos Quorum Lease to Raft.