And if you're considering Paxos, PaxosLease[0] is a nice, fast variation that's much less complex to actually implement in a production setting, and doesn't req

And if you're considering Paxos, PaxosLease[0] is a nice, fast variation that's much less complex to actually implement in a production setting, and doesn't require co-ordinated clocks (clocks only need be consistent—monotonic—locally). It's amazing how far you can get with a reliable leader election protocol in a distributed system. We're getting to the point where all of the other stuff is just picking specific algorithms with specific tradeoffs, much like you do today in a non-distributed setting. [0] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.4187.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.4187.pdf