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Leader Election

A mechanism in distributed systems to designate a single master/leader node responsible for coordinating actions across worker nodes.

Definition

A mechanism in distributed systems to designate a single master/leader node responsible for coordinating actions across worker nodes.

Use case

Using ZooKeeper or Raft to automatically elect a new primary node when the leader database crashes.

Related terms

Articles

Leader election

Wikipedia · Article · link checked 2026-10-16

How distributed systems agree on who is in charge.

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