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The gossip protocol spreads information across a large cluster without any central coordinator. At regular intervals, each node picks a few random peers and shares what it knows. Those peers pass it along in the next round, and before long the whole cluster has the update.

Systems like Cassandra, Consul, and Redis Cluster use gossip to keep track of which nodes are in the cluster, which ones are healthy, and which node owns which data.

In this chapter, we will look at how gossip works, how fast it spreads information, how it is used for membership and failure detection, and where it fits next to consensus.