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I am surprised: 1. I am technically pretty strong but I have no idea what this paper is about 2. So many people know this is about that it shot up to #1 on HN

I am surprised: 1. I am technically pretty strong but I have no idea what this paper is about 2. So many people know this is about that it shot up to #1 on HN Can someone give a pointer (a link or two) to the lay, interested audience here about what the field IS. Just a sort of intro guide to someone who knows about programming and math, but has never heard the term paxos? I am curious, and I am sure many others are as well. edit: spelling

cube2222 10y ago
It's basically the topic of distributed computing and algorithms for the coordination of distributed systems. This is a great introductory course about it in my opinion: https://www.coursera.org/learn/cloud-computing https://www.coursera.org/learn/cloud-computing Then, it's just reading papers like, which you mentioned, "The part time parliment" (paxos)
iainmerrick 10y ago
Wikipedia is pretty good. The page for "consensus algorithm" has links for Paxos and Raft. The basic idea is how to coordinate multiple independent agents over an unreliable network. For example, multiple servers trying to manage a shared database. Lots of HN people know about this because it's a key building block of reliable and scalable cloud computing.
krenoten 10y ago
These consensus algorithms are awesome! They are the backbones of many highly available systems in modern DC's today. It's how people manage to get any sleep at all when taking care of systems that require very reliable databases. Raft is a consensus algorithm that is touted as being easy to understand. It is well specified, compared to paxos, which leaves many implementation details up to the creator. Raft, however, is fairly explicitly specified on page 4 of this paper: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf Consensus algorithms allow us to build reliable castles out of constantly failing servers (sand). Systems like zookeeper, etcd, chubby, consul, and others use these algorithms to achieve high availability AND strong consistency (linearizability, the strongest possible) despite up to a majority of the cluster failing.
- krenoten 10y ago
  Whoops, I meant to say "up to the largest minority failing", if a majority is lost then the gig is up! Too late to edit!
robotresearcher 10y ago
Lesley Lamport, Paxos inventor, describes it thus in the abstract to the original paper: "[Paxos] provides a new way of implementing the state-machine approach to the design of distributed systems." Original Paxos paper (written with somewhat whimsical style): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/part-time-parliament/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/part-ti... Follow up paper to explain Paxos more simply: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/paxos-made-simple/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fum%2Fpeople%2Flamport%2Fpubs%2Fpaxos-simple.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/paxos-m... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)

cube2222 10y ago

It's basically the topic of distributed computing and algorithms for the coordination of distributed systems. This is a great introductory course about it in my opinion: https://www.coursera.org/learn/cloud-computing https://www.coursera.org/learn/cloud-computing Then, it's just reading papers like, which you mentioned, "The part time parliment" (paxos)

iainmerrick 10y ago

Wikipedia is pretty good. The page for "consensus algorithm" has links for Paxos and Raft. The basic idea is how to coordinate multiple independent agents over an unreliable network. For example, multiple servers trying to manage a shared database. Lots of HN people know about this because it's a key building block of reliable and scalable cloud computing.

krenoten 10y ago

These consensus algorithms are awesome! They are the backbones of many highly available systems in modern DC's today. It's how people manage to get any sleep at all when taking care of systems that require very reliable databases. Raft is a consensus algorithm that is touted as being easy to understand. It is well specified, compared to paxos, which leaves many implementation details up to the creator. Raft, however, is fairly explicitly specified on page 4 of this paper: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf Consensus algorithms allow us to build reliable castles out of constantly failing servers (sand). Systems like zookeeper, etcd, chubby, consul, and others use these algorithms to achieve high availability AND strong consistency (linearizability, the strongest possible) despite up to a majority of the cluster failing.

krenoten 10y ago
Whoops, I meant to say "up to the largest minority failing", if a majority is lost then the gig is up! Too late to edit!

robotresearcher 10y ago

Lesley Lamport, Paxos inventor, describes it thus in the abstract to the original paper: "[Paxos] provides a new way of implementing the state-machine approach to the design of distributed systems." Original Paxos paper (written with somewhat whimsical style): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/part-time-parliament/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/part-ti... Follow up paper to explain Paxos more simply: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/paxos-made-simple/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fum%2Fpeople%2Flamport%2Fpubs%2Fpaxos-simple.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/paxos-m... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)