[HN Gopher] Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distrib... ___________________________________________________________________ Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? Author : rbanffy Score : 65 points Date : 2020-04-27 09:57 UTC (13 hours ago) (HTM) web link (arxiv.org) (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org) | throw0101a wrote: | Ten minute video by co-author on this: | | * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQss0uQUc6o | | See also her PhD dissertation, "Distributed consensus revised": | | * https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-935.html | jganetsk wrote: | Heidi Howard is incredible and her work on distributed consensus | is illuminating. I think she has actually successfully cracked | the cookie of "making consensus easy". | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTHOwgpMIiU | chapium wrote: | I thought raft was the obvious choice since it is a far simpler | framework. | cmckn wrote: | The conclusion of the paper is that there isn't actually a | significant difference between the algorithms. The Raft paper | is much clearer about implementation, but (as Heidi says) the | impl ideas from the Raft paper can be applied to Paxos in many | cases. Raft's leader election _is_ a bit more elegant and | results in a less complex implementation. The paper was a great | read! | enitihas wrote: | Is there any open source widely used implementation of multi | paxos, because single paxos doesn't seem useful by itself. | ccleve wrote: | The paper's main conclusion is accurate. Raft is more | understandable because of the clarity of the paper. But | implementation is very tricky. As I've written elsewhere it takes | weeks or months to write a solid implementation from scratch. | prismatk wrote: | Raft itself - rather than any framework in which you would | actually want to use it - is quite simple to implement. A few | classmates of mine and I implemented a barebones Raft instance | in about a weekend. | ideal0227 wrote: | I think all these kinds of papers are very confusing. Comparing | RSM (replicated state machine) to Paxos is just like comparing a | car to an engine. It makes very little or no sense. | | In the original Paxos paper | (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf), the | part 3 (RSM) is not extensively explained. There are countless | ways to use Paxos to implement RSM. Multipaxos/Raft/Epaxos try to | fill in that gap. | | By any means, Paxos itself is 10x simpler than Raft or whatever. | Every time I heard a "distributed system" engineer said Paxos is | complicated, I know he/she does not have much experience in the | field or at least has never implemented the core consensus | part... | wahern wrote: | Indeed, in the paper they're comparing MultiPaxos to Raft. | | EDIT: For others, here's a _very_ comprehensive (as of ~2018) | review of Paxos-related distributed consensus algorithms with | an exposition for each one: https://vadosware.io/post/paxosmon- | gotta-concensus-them-all/ That's 17 in all, excluding the | original Paxos paper. IMO, it should be linked anywhere Paxos | is discussed. The link has been posted twice before by others | on HN, but unfortunately hasn't seen any discussion, perhaps | because it speaks for itself. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-04-27 23:00 UTC)