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> Does anyone actually use Paxos in real life? Yes, it's very widely used at Google through Chubby, which underpins many core pieces of infrastructure, includi
by vitus 2y ago
> Does anyone actually use Paxos in real life?
Yes, it's very widely used at Google through Chubby, which underpins many core pieces of infrastructure, including name resolution. (It used to be common practice to depend more directly on Chubby for synchronization of state via shared global files, but that fell out of favor about 6 years ago due to reliability risks associated with just blasting out changes globally without any canarying.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)#Production_use_of_Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)#Produ... lists a bunch of other use cases (notably, Google's Spanner and Amazon's DynamoDB).
> And let me ask the same question for all other academic distributed algorithms right away.
Raft (designed as a more understandable alternative to Paxos) is more commonly used, as I understand it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm)#Production_use_of_Raft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm)#Production_us...
> I recall seeing a study some 10 years ago checking the major cloud providers for Byzantine fault tolerance and finding none of them to exhibit the qualities that the known algorithms would guarantee.
I'm curious which study you're referring to. I could believe that while Paxos might be used as a building block, it might not be used in a consistent manner throughout.
Also, note that not all of the variations of Paxos handle Byzantine faults.
- generationP 2y agoAh, so Raft is what everyone uses, and Paxos is used by the very big providers nowadays. Good to know! I can't find the study any more, though I'm pretty sure I saw it on HN...