Hi Alex - This looks a lot like what Scylladb did to unleash the potential of the Cassandra space, with a fully optimized C++ rewrite of an Apache project. Did you draw some inspiration from their efforts?
As a satisfied Scylla convert, I'm looking forward to trying Redpanda.
I'm a fan of scylla too, but if I could go back in time I'd have recommended waiting until mid 2019 to migrate. 'Fully optimized C++ rewrite's tend to take years to become battle tested.
there are 2 levels here. 1) raft has a proof (and a great phd dissertation from diego), but what matters is if we actually implemented it correctly. so 2) is we need to continuously test it. Denis did a lot of similar work at CosmosDB (microsoft) and has spent his career working on consensus.
totally. today if folks. need txns, they wouldn't be a good fit for us. What we found is about 90% of use cases are covered by the base api. For reference w/ all of the versioning there is something like 144 api calls you can make to kafka, most ppl use a small subset of those via high level clients. (java, python, librdkafka, etc)
As a satisfied Scylla convert, I'm looking forward to trying Redpanda.