Neon, a company focusing on distributed systems, opts for Paxos over Raft for its consensus replication due to its architecture, which separates storage and compute, replacing the PostgreSQL persistency layer with a custom-made distributed storage system written in Rust. This separation allows some nodes to operate without persistent disks, and Paxos supports proposers without storage, unlike Raft, which requires uniform nodes. While Raft offers a more user-friendly approach by simplifying the implementation of consensus protocols, Neon's architecture benefits from Paxos's flexibility in handling different roles for nodes, such as compute nodes as proposers and safekeepers as acceptors. Neon's strategy involves maintaining a general Paxos approach while incorporating specific Raft concepts, such as term assignment, to achieve high availability and failover in their PostgreSQL setup. Despite the inherent complexity of designing distributed consensus protocols, Neon's approach aims to minimize changes to PostgreSQL while ensuring reliability, even in the event of node or network failures.