Coordination · Estimate

How many nodes does a consensus cluster (Raft, ZooKeeper) need to keep working with any 3 of them down?

easy Consistency Availability

Answer

About 7 nodes. In review, anything from 6.36 to 7.7 counts as right.

The worked estimate

It needs a majority of all nodes alive. To tolerate f failures you need 2f + 1 nodes: 2 × 3 + 1 = 7 nodes, whose majority is 4. With 6, the majority is also 4, so only 2 may fail. Most clusters stop at 5: every extra node joins every write.

Numbers: Numbers to know.

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