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

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)