Paxos Deep Dive for System Design
Explore how the Paxos algorithm provides consensus for replicated state machines in distributed systems. Learn its core safety properties and liveness goals, and understand its role in maintaining data consistency and fault tolerance through single and multi-decree consensus approaches.
Motivation: Log replication via consensus
Paxos is a consensus algorithm used by multiple entities to agree on something of interest, such as maintaining consistency among multiple copies of data. As we learned in our state machine replication chapter, we can model a broad range of computation as a state machine, and replicating such a state machine at different nodes provides us fault tolerance. Commands transition a state machine from one consistent state to the next. To ensure consistency, it is necessary to establish consensus among the replicas of the state machine regarding the specific command to be executed and the order in which it should be executed. Paxos being a consensus algorithm is a natural choice in this scenario. (We will learn about Paxos in the context of state machine replication because it is generic and applicable for many use cases.)
We will use the Paxos algorithm to achieve consensus on a single ...