[hintymad]

Is there any paper/handouts/video that explains Paxos in depth, especially its implementations and intuitions? Paxos Made Simple gave intuitive explanations, but I feel it still misses a lot of intricate details if I were to build Praxos for production use.

[mananaysiempre]

The papers and talks[1] by Heidi Howard and Richard Mortier, in particular “Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?”[2,3] and “Flexible Paxos”[4,5], are what finally made things click for me. A real implementation also needs other stuff[6], though, such as dynamic membership and state machine replication, which I still don’t know how to do.

[1] https://fpaxos.github.io/

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3380787.3393681 or https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K6kt39wyH0

[4] https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2016.25 or https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06696

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6NG_1HM0lA

[6] https://github.com/heidihoward/distributed-consensus-reading...

[nvarsj]

The best approach is to implement Paxos.

I suggest https://github.com/emichael/dslabs.

It will take 100-200 hours to fully implement with all tests passing.

[withinboredom]

Bummer that it requires java. Would be awesome to have a 'networked' version where you just need to implement the protocol.

[nvarsj]

Usage of java is fine ime. It's the principles that matter. The main benefit of this project is the search based tests which thoroughly test your implementation for edge cases. There's nothing else quite like it - few people can successfully complete this project to 100%.

[withinboredom]

Yeah, that's the thing, I want to give this a go. I just hate Java.

[nvarsj]

Hah fair enough. The volume of code is low overall though so the language doesn't matter that much.