[parley]

Yours is an excellent comment, factual and even handed. As someone who had to delve into these things and had to implement e.g. a variant of MultiPaxos for work (this was before Raft existed), I agree that there is a bit of unhealthy confusion going around.

We generalize every day because everyone can't be expected to learn everything, so we abstract away, define constraints and best practices and we select our library-fied tools and apply them. We do this with operating systems, file systems, encryption, and also with distributed systems. The basics of distributed systems and their invariants and trade offs are not that hard if you give yourself time to study them properly, but when you want high performance and scale it does get Challenging.

It is important that any abstractions we make, any generalizations, constraint definitions and best practices that we expect people to read, accept and adhere to are as correct as possible without breaking that abstraction. So thank you for your comment. Please note that mine is not a pro-Paxos comment either, just one appreciating good information being spread so that people can make good choices and trade offs.

Distributed systems are hard. To paraphrase: In the data flow, no one can hear your canary msg scream.