3 ms·
Curious, why Paxos over Raft?
by fokker 8y ago
Curious, why Paxos over Raft?
- TheDong 8y agoNote that there's 3-10 variants of Paxos depending on who you ask and how many research papers you've read. Paxos has different performance characteristics, different implementations, and more maturity. There is no simple answer to your question unless you make it more specific.
- fokker 8y agoConsidering we’re talking about distributed state-machines, I am curious why you would choose Paxos, a more complex algorithm over Raft. Raft, to my knowledge provides the same guarantees as Paxos, and is simpler to understand and implement. I am no expert on Paxos - just hoping for an explanation.
- skyde 8y agoPaxos itself and not something built on top of Paxos like multi Paxos is in fact super simple compared to raft. Where it get complicated is trying to build a practical replicated log system using Paxos. Raft just happen to clearly and completely define this use case. What SDPaxos or EPaxos try to achieve is good performance over WAN. Something that Raft and any Paxos variant that rely on a stable leader are very bad at. This can’t be easily added to raft because the main reason the raft algorithm is simpler is because it assume a stable leader in every operation except leader election.
- kerneltime 8y agoAFAIK, Raft is a form of Paxos, spec-ed out to do log replication.
- fokker 8y agoYes and we’re talking about distributed state machines, right? A raft append-only log usually contains state machine commands.
- skyde 8y agoActually raft is just a simplified version of multi-paxos that minimize state space needed.