Lecture Notes on Leader-based Sequence Paxos -- An Understandable Sequence Consensus Algorithm

TL;DR

This paper presents a clear, practical Paxos-based algorithm for reconfigurable sequence consensus in distributed systems, making complex consensus concepts more understandable and accessible.

Contribution

It introduces a complete, step-by-step transformation from basic Paxos to a reconfigurable sequence consensus algorithm, enhancing understanding and implementation.

Findings

Provides a practical, understandable Paxos-based sequence consensus algorithm

Enables dynamic reconfiguration in distributed log systems

Simplifies the implementation of consensus in fault-tolerant systems

Abstract

Agreement among a set of processes and in the presence of partial failures is one of the fundamental problems of distributed systems. In the most general case, many decisions must be agreed upon over the lifetime of a system with dynamically changing membership. Such a sequence of decisions represents a distributed log, and can form the underlying abstraction for driving a replicated state machine. While this abstraction is at the core of many systems with strong consistency requirements, algorithms that achieve such sequence consensus are often poorly understood by developers and have presented a significant challenge to many students of distributed systems. In these lecture notes we present a complete and practical Paxos-based algorithm for reconfigurable sequence consensus in the fail-recovery model, and a clear path of simple step-by-step transformations to it from the basic Paxos algorithm.