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#paxos#distributedconsensus#raft

Liberating Distributed Consensus - Heidi Howard

Reactive Summit

3.9K subscribers • 2 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Heidi Howard, computer science researcher

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

6.9K views7 years ago4 recommendations

Distributed systemsComputer scienceConsensus: Raft and PaxosReplication and consistencyAlgorithms

Heidi Howard explains how to generalize and optimize the Paxos algorithm by weakening its original consensus requirements.

The ability to reach consensus between hosts, whether for addressing, primary election, locking, or coordination, is a fundamental necessity of modern distributed systems. The Paxos algorithm is at the heart of how we achieve distributed consensus today and as such has been the subject of extensive research to extend and optimise the algorithm for practical distributed systems. In the talk, we revisit the underlying theory behind Paxos, weakening its original requirements and generalising the algorithm. We demonstrate that Paxos is, in fact, a single point on a broad spectrum of approaches to consensus and conclude by arguing that other points on this spectrum offer a much-improved foundation for constructing scalable, resilient and high performance distributed systems. Slides and more information: reactivesummit.org/2018/schedule/liberating-distributed-cons…

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as an illuminating and accessible explanation of distributed consensus and Paxos generalizations.

jganetskon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?”

Heidi Howard is incredible and her work on distributed consensus is illuminating. I think she has actually successfully cracked the cookie of "making consensus easy". link to this video

richdoughertyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award”

Check out Heidi Howard's work for some nice generalisations and variations of Paxos. Her approach using immutable state makes things more tractable. link link to this video

j-pbon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Keeping CALM: When Distributed Consistency Is Easy”

…consistent iff they are logically monotonic. Coordination as used in this article basically means "needs to be decided by an authority". But because of CALM we know that in order to elect an authority/leader, you need a consensus algorithm that actually has monotonicity at it's core, like raft. There's a really great talk on this by Heidi Howard: link to this video I actually don't think that database isolation levels are a good way to talk about this stuff, because they are practical guarantees, not theoretical ones. Snapshot isolation for example also requires a leader. From a theoretical point of view there is no in between (at least none that I can see), either you are eventually consistent or you…

poooogleson Hacker News • Recommends

On “A Review of Consensus Protocols”

>A more recent development is Heidi Howard's work Glad someone has mentioned her here. This talk helped me greatly link to this video .