Abstract
Paxos is a flexible and fault tolerant protocol for solving the consensus problem, where participants in a distributed system need to agree on a common value. However, Paxos is reputed for being difficult to understand. This tutorial aims to address this difficulty by visualizing Paxos in a completely new way. Starting from a naive solution and strong assumptions, Paxos is derived in a step-wise fashion. In each step, minimal changes are made to the solution and assumptions, aimed at understanding why the solution fails. In this manner, a correct solution that corresponds to Paxos is eventually reached.
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Meling, H., Jehl, L. (2013). Tutorial Summary: Paxos Explained from Scratch. In: Baldoni, R., Nisse, N., van Steen, M. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8304. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03850-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03850-6_1
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