> Wait, so you’re blocking on a Raft round-trip to make forward progress? That’s the correct decision wrt durability, but…

Yeah. I hope it was clear in my post that the goal was developer productivity, not performance.

The round trip is only an issue on writes, and reads are super fast. At least in my app, this works out great. The writes also parallelize nicely with respect to the round trips, since the underlying Raft library just bundles multiple transactions together. Where it is a bottleneck is if you're writing multiple times sequentially on the same thread.

The solution there is you create a single named transaction that does the multiple writes. Then the only thing that needs to be replicated is that one transaction even though you might be writing multiple fields.

> it’s been a few years since I’ve had to debug Paxos

And this is why I wouldn't have recommended this with Paxos. Raft on the other hand is super easy for anyone to understand.