I used to work in the orbit of a distinguished eng at AWS who was famous for saying something to the effect of, "At the bottom of any scaled distributed system is either Paxos, or a bug."
There's also ZooKeeper with its own consensus protocol.
Why use Paxos instead of Raft?
41–46 of 46 posts
Re: Why use Paxos instead of Raft?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming we're thinking of the same person, I believe it went: "There are three types of consistent distributed systems: paxos, broken protocols, and single points of failures."
i don't understand why people won't just say alv. he won't hurt you.
You're assuming the name matters more than the content.
Re: Why use Paxos instead of Raft?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
For some reason, people considering PAXOS/RAFT don't tend to consider CRDT/OT synchronization. I think this is a big oversight. We should start considering CRDT/OT/VCS/Diffsync approaches to distributed systems as well. They present a very nice alternative approach: whereas PAXOS/RAFT implement a consistent "distributed state machine", a CRDT, OT, VCS, or Diffsync system implements consistent "distributed state", upo…
Would this approach be resistant to a rogue actor. If one actor bad data would all the other actors still be able to reach consensus? Paxos is complicated, but it’s well studied and proven.
Neither OT/CRDT nor Paxos/Raft are meant to resist rogue actors. They are not Byzantine fault tolerant.
Re: Why use Paxos instead of Raft?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
i don't understand why people won't just say alv. he won't hurt you.
You're assuming the name matters more than the content.
i guess he never explained a false dichotomy to you :).
knowing who said this allows readers to be able to look up more of the (unfortunately scant) content publicly available from him.
Re: Why use Paxos instead of Raft?
#45This is a great writeup, thanks. It will be very useful if y'all could add a post comparing neon with citusdb in terms of functionality, performance and operations.
Agreed. This would make a wonderful follow up post!
Re: Why use Paxos instead of Raft?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming we're thinking of the same person, I believe it went: "There are three types of consistent distributed systems: paxos, broken protocols, and single points of failures."
i don't understand why people won't just say alv. he won't hurt you.
Really sucks the mystery out of the room though, doesn't it?
It's almost more impressive that people know who it is without saying the name.