Hello Ratis community, a fellow Apache member here :) I am currently researching an option to integrate a consensus module for Apache Ignite, mostly as metadata storage and group membership service in the beginning. I could not help noticing that there is a neighbor Apache project that looks very promising.
I am just getting started and see that the messaging layer is separated from the core Raft algorithm implementation, but the message definitions and serialization are Google Protobuf-generated. In Ignite, we have a custom serialization protocol and try to keep the core module as small as possible, so the protobuf dependency does not quite fit our project. I was wondering if you have any plans for abstracting the serialization layer as well, or perhaps would accept a contribution that implements such a separation (after the design is discussed here, of course)? Or, perhaps, I missed something and I can plug custom messages to the Ratis core somehow? Thanks in advance, --Alexey Goncharuk
