Can someone familiar with this topic explain how the Raft consensus protocol is different from the other popular consensus protocols?

You can refer to this article: https://blog.container-solutions.com/raft-explained-part-23-...

Yes: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/raft-paper/

Raft achieves consensus with a log as opposed to a single value. This makes it ideal for databases as they are already working with a write log.

Also, it seems that Raft is easier to understand and implement, according to some papers and blog posts I skimmed.

Every single concept here smells "Google". Is this a project of an ex-googler?

TiDB/TiKV's CTO here. I don't think so, the co-founding team is not ex-Googlers, but we're all big fans of the papers published by Google, especially, the Spanner/F1/BigTable...So it's no surprise that this project has a little bit `Google flavor`

Ref: https://tikv.org/docs/3.0/concepts/overview/

The barrier you will find is that while you have built awesome tech, the vast majority of commercial users with "big data" in fact have small data and small consistency and availability requirements, and a mongodb instance works just fine for them, and that's what they'll choose because they don't want the complexity of managing consensus groups or other theoretical compsci stuff.

Make this stuff so it "just works" with a one liner command to get started, and you'll have a commercial success.

this, and i don't even do data science. look at k8s vs all it's smaller siblings: minikube, k3s, etc. i know what i'd rather use in production if i'm a small team. bonus points for ansible scripts in the standard package that i can customize.

If it were it would probably be implemented in Go instead of Rust.

For a moment I thought the diagrams in this article could have been created using TikZ.

I think they are created using google slides.