BALLAST: When a Bandit Teaches Your Database How Long to Wait
Imagine you’re a team leader. You send a message and wait for a response. How long do you wait before assuming your colleague has “disappeared”? Too short — and you panic for no reason. Too long — and the whole project stalls. BALLAST is a system that teaches databases to answer this question automatically, using machine learning techniques. The Problem: Raft’s Achilles Heel Raft is a consensus protocol — the way distributed databases (like etcd, Consul, CockroachDB) agree on who’s the “leader” and which data is current. It works like this: ...