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by engineeringwoke 197 days ago
Basically the modern web uses orchestration, for pretty much everything. Usually Kubernetes is doing that. Theoretically protocols like RAFT are formally verifiable, but their implementations in orchestration tools like etcd have not been, and I would go so far as to say that that is an impossible task. Therefore, the entire exercise is kind of silly.
1 comments

Thanks, interesting. However, that just seems like a protocol like any other, with no real reason why you "can't" formally verify it. Is there something special about a consensus algorithm / protocol that makes it any more difficult to verify than any other algorithm which doesn't yet have a formally verified implementation?

Edit: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48989-6_...

That would be like saying that you can verify the software that CERN uses to measure the Higgs Boson because we verified general relativity.
> You can't formally verify anything that uses consensus

What did you mean by this then? There certainly seems to be nothing special about consensus that makes it any harder to verify than anything else. It's not fundamentally impossible to verify the software that CERN uses, it just takes some work.