Paxos in Pictures: Lamport's Distributed Consensus Algorithm

Paxos is a computer algorithm to help a network of computers agree on a proposed value. It is hard to understand at first. This video attempts to explain Paxos intuitively yet rigorously. The content comes from Lamport's 2001 paper "Paxos Made Simple".

Note that this video is not as rigorous as the paper it's based on. Specifically, it doesn't contain a precise statement of what Paxos accomplishes and it doesn't say how to optimize Paxos or deal with corner cases. For that, please see the referenced paper "Paxos Made Simple". The intent of THIS video is simply to provide a nice explanation and a visual illustration of the basic idea behind the algorithm.

Slides:

http://justinppearson.com/research.ht...

References:

Lamport, Leslie (2001). Paxos Made Simple ACM SIGACT News (Distributed Computing Column) 32, 4 (Whole Number 121, December 2001) 51-58.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/u...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%...


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