Bruno Bonacci on Viewstamped Replication @PWL London

Bruno Bonacci explains the Viewstamped Replication consensus protocol, comparing it to Paxos and walking through the 2012 paper's optimizations.

Viewstamped Replication is a protocol to replicate state and converge to a consistent view in face of non Byzantine failures. The original paper was published in 1988 and then revisited in 2012. It is regarded as one of the first papers on distributed consensus; as comparison Lamport's Paxos paper ("The part-time parliament" dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=279229) was published ten years later. The original paper is harder to read as the terminology used is for distributed systems evolved over the years. The 2012 paper is much simpler to read and it touches on a number of possible optimisations over the protocol. In this talk we will be taking a look to the 2012 paper and how the protocol works and touching on the original paper as well.