Learning Ractor with Raft by Micah Gates Ractor is a new concurrency mechanism in Ruby that unlocks great performance improvement possibilities. Its well defined sharing and messaging system makes it easier to reason about than threaded models. Raft is a distributed consensus algorithm that backs distributed data stores such as Etcd, Console, and soon, Kafka; it’s designed to be straightforward and easy to understand. In this session we’ll build a simple Raft implementation from scratch using Ractor. Ractor is one of the most exciting new features of Ruby, and modeling a distributed system is a great way to see what it can offer.