Project Circe February Update

Project Circe is an initiative aimed at enhancing ScyllaDB's capabilities in consistency, performance, scalability, stability, manageability, and ease of use. A significant focus of the February 2021 update is the integration of the Raft consensus protocol, which introduces leader-based log replication to ScyllaDB, differing from the previously used leaderless Paxos protocol. Raft's implementation facilitates topology changes, ensuring consistent configuration updates across nodes, and addresses the challenges posed by the slower gossip protocol. It also supports linearizable schema changes, resolving issues with eventual consistency. Additionally, Raft enables the introduction of "tablets," a concept borrowed from Google Bigtable, for dynamic load balancing and efficient data distribution. Recent developments include Raft-related commits and improvements to the DynamoDB-compatible interface, Alternator, alongside progress in ScyllaDB's Kubernetes operator.