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Aleksey Charapko's DistSys Reading Group had an interesting discussion on RAFT, Paxos and Viewstamped Replication recently, where I was able to present James Co

by _vvhw 5y ago

Aleksey Charapko's DistSys Reading Group had an interesting discussion on RAFT, Paxos and Viewstamped Replication recently, where I was able to present James Cowling's 2012 revision of VSR: http://charap.co/reading-group-viewstamped-replication-revisited/ http://charap.co/reading-group-viewstamped-replication-revis... RAFT is more within the tradition and family of Viewstamped Replication than Multi-Paxos, and VSR has some optimizations beyond RAFT that are interesting, especially where a real-world storage fault model is at play.

jimsimmons 5y ago
Very interesting, I was under the impression that VSR was but Raft by another name. Not sure what caveats come with the alleged "in memory" nature of VSR but if it indeed doesn't require disk persistence, then it would bring a massive throughout boost. It'd be kinda surprising for the industry and academia to have sidelined it relative to Raft and Multi Paxos in that case.
- _vvhw 5y ago
  It's interesting as you say, since Brian Oki's VSR would pioneer consensus in 1988, a year before Paxos, and James Cowling's and Barbara Liskov's 2012 revision of VSR would also be ahead of RAFT by 2 years, and with an even more intuitive presentation since the view change in 2012 VSR is completely deterministic and not random. The talk I gave linked above goes into 2012 VSR and disk persistence in much more detail, taking into account our experience implementing VSR for TigerBeetle: https://www.tigerbeetle.com https://www.tigerbeetle.com You may also especially enjoy these two recent back-to-back interviews with Brian Oki and James Cowling, paying tribute to the pioneering protocol and especially the people behind it, with Barbara Liskov at the center connecting 1988 and 2012: https://youtu.be/_Jlikdtm4OA?t=708 https://youtu.be/_Jlikdtm4OA?t=708 The interviews are a fascinating look at the history of consensus, and the background around the design decisions that went into the protocol over the years. James Cowling also shares some details of his experience leading the Magic Pocket storage infrastructure team at Dropbox that moved Dropbox off AWS.

by _vvhw 5y ago

jimsimmons 5y ago

Very interesting, I was under the impression that VSR was but Raft by another name. Not sure what caveats come with the alleged "in memory" nature of VSR but if it indeed doesn't require disk persistence, then it would bring a massive throughout boost. It'd be kinda surprising for the industry and academia to have sidelined it relative to Raft and Multi Paxos in that case.

_vvhw 5y ago
It's interesting as you say, since Brian Oki's VSR would pioneer consensus in 1988, a year before Paxos, and James Cowling's and Barbara Liskov's 2012 revision of VSR would also be ahead of RAFT by 2 years, and with an even more intuitive presentation since the view change in 2012 VSR is completely deterministic and not random. The talk I gave linked above goes into 2012 VSR and disk persistence in much more detail, taking into account our experience implementing VSR for TigerBeetle: https://www.tigerbeetle.com https://www.tigerbeetle.com You may also especially enjoy these two recent back-to-back interviews with Brian Oki and James Cowling, paying tribute to the pioneering protocol and especially the people behind it, with Barbara Liskov at the center connecting 1988 and 2012: https://youtu.be/_Jlikdtm4OA?t=708 https://youtu.be/_Jlikdtm4OA?t=708 The interviews are a fascinating look at the history of consensus, and the background around the design decisions that went into the protocol over the years. James Cowling also shares some details of his experience leading the Magic Pocket storage infrastructure team at Dropbox that moved Dropbox off AWS.