Paxos
Family of protocols for distributed consensus.
Origin
Leslie Lamport, 1989 (rejected from ACM TOCS for being too fanciful); finally published in 1998 as "The Part-Time Parliament." Lamport wrote "Paxos Made Simple" in 2001 because nobody could read the original. Multi-Paxos is the practical variant used in Spanner and Chubby.
Where it shows up in production
- Google Chubby The lock service that runs underneath every GFS/Bigtable/Spanner cluster. Multi-Paxos in production since ~2006.
- Google Spanner Paxos-replicated tablet groups; one of the largest Paxos deployments in the world.
- Apache Cassandra Lightweight Transactions use Paxos for compare-and-set; not Cassandra's default path but available when you need it.
On Semicolony
Sources & further reading
Found this useful?