I think there’s a similar philosophy around simplicity and operator experience. Where Ayder diverges is in durability and recovery semantics nsq intentionally trades some of that off to stay lightweight.

The goal here is to keep the “easy to run” feeling, but with stronger guarantees around crash recovery and replication.

VSR makes a lot of sense for their problem space: fixed schema, deterministic state machine, and a very tight control over replication + execution order.

Ayder has a different set of constraints: - append-only logs with streaming semantics - dynamic topics / partitions - external clients producing arbitrary payloads over HTTP

Raft here is a pragmatic choice: it’s well understood, easier to reason about for operators, and fits the “easy to try, easy to operate” goal of the system.

That said, I think VSR is a great example of what’s possible when you fully own the problem and can specialize aggressively. Definitely a project I’ve learned from.