Towards an intuitive high-performance consensus algorithm

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Towards an intuitive high-performance consensus algorithm
Heidi Howard, Read, Write & Execute, 2019/03/08
This article looks at 'distributed consensus', that is, "is the problem of how to reach decisions in asynchronous and unreliable distributed systems." As Heidi Howard outlines, the two most widely known algorithms are Paxos (which I've covered here before) and Raft (which I thought I'd covered, but I can't find it). The difficulty with consensus algorithms is that they must not only work, they must be intuitive. We won't trust a consensus we don't understand. That's what this article is about. Howard writes, "We aim to improve performance and understandability by utilising two key weapons: generality and immutability." More...