Leader-Follower Versus Leaderless
TradeoffDistributed SystemsSeniorStaffUpdated
Write-heavy time-series workload, 100k writes/sec, can tolerate eventual reads, must stay available during single-AZ outages.
Short answer: Leaderless (Cassandra, DynamoDB, Riak). Leaderless gives write availability during partitions and scales writes horizontally without re-electing a leader.
The Two Options
A
Leader-follower (Postgres, MySQL, Raft KV)
B
Leaderless (Cassandra, DynamoDB, Riak)
Drill This: Your Pick First
The Better Pick
Option B
Leaderless (Cassandra, DynamoDB, Riak)
Leaderless gives write availability during partitions and scales writes horizontally without re-electing a leader. Quorum tuning controls consistency per op.
When the Other One Wins
Leader-follower (Postgres, MySQL, Raft KV)
If writes must be linearizable and you need cross-row transactions, leader-based (or Spanner-style sharded Paxos) is the right pick.