There's also rqlite. There's definitely a place for this kind of stuff. But we already use a bunch of stuff that does distributed consensus in our stack, and the experience has left us wary of it, especially for global distribution. We almost used rqlite for a statekeeping feature internally, but today we'd certainly just use sqlite+litestream for the same kinds of features, just because it's easier to reason about and to deal with operationally when there's problems.
rqlite author here. Anything else you can tell me about why you decided against it? Just simpler, as you say, to avoid a distributed system when you can (something I understand).
We like rqlite a lot. There's some comments in your issue tracker from Jerome about it at the time. The decision wasn't against rqlite as a piece of software so much as it was us deliberately deciding not to introduce more Raft into our architecture; any place there is Raft, we're concerned we'll essentially need to train our whole on-call rotation on how to handle issues.
The annoying thing about global consensus is that the operational problems tend to be global as well; we had an outage last night (correlated disk failure on 3 different machines!) in Chicago, and it slowed down deploys all the way to Sydney, essentially because of invariants maintained by a global Raft consensus and fed in part from malfunctioning machines.
I think rqlite would make a lot of sense for us for applications where we run multiple regional clusters; it's just that our problems today tend to be global. We're not just looking for opportunities to rip Raft out of our stack; we're also trying to build APIs that regionalize nicely. In nicely-regionalized, contained settings, rqlite might work a treat for us.
https://fly.io/blog/a-foolish-consistency/