title: Benefits of leader/follower over masterless
body: <p>I'm learning about replication strategies and wondering the pros of cassandra (masterless) over mongo (leader/follower).</p>
  <p>From what I've read, they both scale writes the same because writes writes in masterless are sent to all nodes via a quorum, and in leader/follower the master will eventually send writes to all followers</p>
  <p>For reads, if you are using a masterless where R + W &gt; N, then it is also strongly consistent like leader/follower where you only read from the leader.</p>
  <p>So when would you use leader/follower over masterless? How do they scale differently with reads/writes?</p>
  <p>The only 2 differences I could find are:</p>
  <ol>
  <li>leader/follower may scale reads better than masterless if you read from followers, but then you sacrifice consistency from the replication lag</li>
  <li>Masterless has less downtime since we don't have to worry about electing new master when one fails</li>
  </ol>