recall

← recall

Paxos concept

The original consensus algorithm (Lamport, late 1980s/published 1998).

The original consensus algorithm (Lamport, late 1980s/published 1998). Lets a set of nodes agree on a single value despite asynchronous networks and node failures, as long as a majority is alive. Famously hard to understand from the original paper; "Paxos Made Simple" helped, but most practical systems chose Raft for the same guarantees with a more intuitive presentation. Multi-Paxos and ZooKeeper's ZAB are derivatives still in heavy production use.

Lamport's foundational consensus protocol. Multi-Paxos is what real systems implement. Used by Google's Chubby, Spanner. Most engineers learn Raft instead.

see also

topics: distributed-systems, consensus

references: