1. In my research, raft followers would still be thinking for themselves. Each node could potentially become master, which would be fine in most cases, but I just want a dum stupid slave database to pull a read only copy. My concern is latency and load. I want to be able to predict hotspots. I don't want api-node-3 to become the leader for that site, I want db-1 and db-2 to be where everything happens.
> In my research, raft followers would still be thinking for themselves.
There is a lot more going on than vanilla raft. Cockroach's range lease feature (which is NOT the same as the raft leader election) automatically moves the lease to the node that minimizes latency. You can control this behavior via meta data and matching rules. I'd suggest skimming: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/demo-follow-the-wo...
Again, you're making a lot of assumptions that seem rooted in "cockroach == a raft cluster". There's a lot more going on than that.
