Diego Ongaro is the computer scientist who created the Raft consensus algorithm. The official Raft site at raft.github.io credits Raft to Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout, and Ongaro carried out the work as a PhD student at Stanford University.
Ongaro’s doctoral dissertation, hosted on Ousterhout’s Stanford page as OngaroPhD.pdf, presents the full treatment of the algorithm. The thesis is titled “Consensus: Bridging Theory and Practice,” reflecting its aim of taking consensus from the theoretical literature into a form practitioners can implement correctly.
The shorter conference paper that he co-authored, “In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm,” won a Best Paper Award at the 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. The dissertation goes further, covering details such as cluster membership changes, log compaction, and client interaction that real implementations must address.
Through Raft, Ongaro’s work shaped a large part of modern distributed-systems infrastructure, with the algorithm adopted by systems such as etcd, Consul, and TiKV.