FWIW, I built hraftd[1] many years ago to make it easy to play with a simple distributed system, but one that uses a production-grade implementation of Raft[2]. You can spin up a cluster in seconds on a single machine, kill nodes, watch a new Leader get elected, and so on.
It's written in Go, so it'll help if you are familiar with Go. But the code is not difficult to understand even if you don't.
It's written in Go, so it'll help if you are familiar with Go. But the code is not difficult to understand even if you don't.
[1] https://github.com/otoolep/hraftd
[2] https://github.com/hashicorp/raft