LeaseGuard is a new enhancement to the Raft consensus protocol that strengthens Raft’s consistency guarantees and time-to-recovery. I developed LeaseGuard with my MongoDB colleagues Murat Demirbas and Lingzhi Deng, and our paper is in SIGMOD 2026. Here’s a summary of the protocol.

Yesterday my friend at Cockroach Labs invited me to present LeaseGuard at their NYC office, here’s the video.