Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? · HackerPapers discussions

Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by mananaysiempre

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 10:21:26 GMT

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…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by _russross

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:16:58 GMT

I am in the minority who thinks Raft is overrated. I tried teaching Raft one year instead of Paxos but ended up switching back. While it was much easier to understand how to implement Raft, I think my students gained deeper insight when focusing on single-decision Paxos. There is a lightbulb moment when they first understand that consensus is a property of the system that happens first (and they can point at the moment it happens) and then the nodes discover that it has been achieved later. Exploring various failure modes and coming to understand how Paxos is robust against them seems to work…

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — HN submission

Sun, 12 May 2024 15:04:53 GMT

Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? (2020)

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by jsmith45

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 19:45:36 GMT

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 This paper argues basically argues that raft has a different leadership election mechanism than paxos, but that if you tweak some terminology, and make a few relatively reasonable implementation choices for paxos they are otherwise pretty equivalent. It even gives a raft style single page description of paxos (using raft style terminology), and shows how little it differs from the equivalent single page summary of raft. The main implementation choices they use are: - combined roles into a single server role - enforce that log messages are decided in sequence…

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by solidangle

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 17:38:03 GMT

For those wondering what the differences between Raft and Paxos are: I can highly recommend the following paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 It presents Paxos similarly to how Raft was originally presented.

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by solidangle

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 22:24:00 GMT

You might be interested in this paper [1] which presents Paxos in the same way as Raft is presented in the Raft paper. In my view it really illustrates that most of the simplicity of Raft comes from its excellent presentation and not necessarily from its algorithmic simplicity. [1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05074

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by solidangle

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 22:15:43 GMT

(Multi-)Paxos and Raft are incredibly similar. I would even argue that Raft is just a variant of Paxos in the same way that e.g. Fast Paxos and EPaxos are variants of Paxos. Most of the Raft algorithm is identical to the Paxos algorithm. The main difference between the two algorithms is how leadership election works. In my view the main reason why Raft is considered to be simpler is because it was presented in a really clear paper. Paxos becomes equally simple when using a similar representation as used in that paper. See this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05074

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by tlamponi

Wed, 19 May 2021 04:34:43 GMT

Best in what metric? raft and paxos are basically the same, besides leader election, which raft's take makes it simply easier and possible even more efficient[0]. I say "possible" because that depends very much on the consensus state over time, which in most actual workloads can be pretty stable, so at least in some practice, e.g., with hypervisor-cluster like we do, they perform almost the same. The simpler approach of raft can help if you create a library for it from scratch, or for easier understanding when coming into that space, otherwise the differences does not matter too much (in…

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by rubiquity

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 19:40:28 GMT

As it pertains to reaching consensus, everything in the "Basic Paxos" section of the article is the same for Raft as it is Paxos. Raft can be seen as instance of Paxos with different terminology and prescribed solutions for leader elections, solving dueling leader issues, and persisting past outcomes. Here's a nice paper on this that dives deeper into the matter and also shows how Paxos can be just as "understandable" as Raft with a few vocabulary changes: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05074.pdf

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by vlovich123

Sun, 10 May 2020 05:04:39 GMT

That's interesting because the recent arxiv paper[1] by Heidi Howard indicated that Raft just has a clearer presentation rather than some technical superiority of being simpler (discussion here [2]). So perhaps people who believe in Paxos need to come up with similarly easy explanations for the community that learn from the presentation that Raft focused on? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22994420

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — mentioned by judofyr

Sat, 09 May 2020 11:00:53 GMT

I'll have to admit that over time I've ended up with mixed feelings about this paper. This is mainly due to people reading this paper without knowing much about consensus and drawing conclusions like "Raft is better than Paxos" or "Raft is the best consensus algorithm" though. Some thoughts (please elaborate if you think I'm simplifying it too much or if you disagree with me!): First of all remember that Paxos is a family of protocols for solving consensus. When doing research it's useful to reduce a problem into smaller and smaller parts. The "standard" Paxos algorithm is a very simple…

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Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? — HN submission

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 09:57:26 GMT

Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?

343 points; 65 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.