Paxos
Paxos is a family of consensus algorithms designed to allow a collection of unreliable processes to agree on a single value, even in the presence of failures and message delays. Developed by Leslie Lamport, the original Paxos protocol was described in 1998 as a solution to reaching agreement in asynchronous networks. The core guarantee is safety: no two different values can be chosen for the same consensus instance, so long as a majority of participants cooperate.
In typical descriptions, participants assume three roles: proposers, acceptors, and learners. A basic Paxos run proceeds
During the accept phase, the proposer sends an accept request containing N and a value V. An
Paxos is robust to crashes but its liveness depends on network conditions and leadership behavior. Variants