Acknowledgments

This book exists because Georgiy Treyvus, Product Manager at CloudStreet, asked for it. His scoping note set the tone: "Paxos, Raft, PBFT, Viewstamped Replication — compared and contrasted with brutal honesty. Understand the real tradeoffs so you can make informed decisions instead of just copying what Kafka does." That framing is the spine of everything that follows. Thank you, Georgiy.

Georgiy also originated the companion volume, How Blockchains Actually Work (Without the Hype). The two books are a pair, and the pair was his idea before it was anyone's writing.

Everything else — the algorithms, the theorems, the post-mortems — is the work of the researchers, engineers, and reviewers whose names appear throughout these chapters and in the further reading. This book is a reader's-guide to their field.