beginnerDistributed Systems — Replication, Partitioning & Consistency

What is the difference between leader-follower and leaderless replication?

Leader-follower: one designated leader accepts all writes; followers replicate from leader. Cons: single bottleneck for writes; leader failure requires election; lag between leader and followers means followers may be stale. Examples: MongoDB, MySQL, Redis Sentinel. Leaderless (Dynamo-style): any replica can accept writes simultaneously. Client writes to W replicas; reads from R replicas. With W +

Ready to master this question?

Generate a complete walkthrough — background, the full answer in plain language, a working code example explained line by line, a real-world scenario, common mistakes, and how this same question gets asked in different ways.

Sign in to generate a response

Next Step

Continue to What is consistent hashing and why is it important for distributed databases?← Back to all NoSQL questions