[prydt]

I've run a reading group for distributed systems for the last 2 years now and I do think that Raft is a better introduction to Consensus than any Paxos paper I have seen (I mean the Paxos Made Simple paper literally has bugs in it). But when I learned consensus in school, we used Paxos and Multi-Paxos and I do believe that there was a lot to be gained by learning both approaches.

Heidi Howard has several amazing papers about how the differences between Raft and Multi-Paxos are very surface level and that Raft's key contribution is its presentation as well as being a more "complete" presentation since there are so many fragmented different presentations of Multi-Paxos.

As a bonus, one of my favorite papers I have read recently is Compartmentalized Paxos: https://vldb.org/pvldb/vol14/p2203-whittaker.pdf which is just a brilliant piece on how to scale Multi-Paxos

[senderista]

There are several Multi-Paxos papers (some of them dating before Raft) that are intended as guidance for implementers:

https://paper-notes.zhjwpku.com/assets/pdfs/paxos_for_system...

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/rvr/Paxos/paxos.pdf

https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/paxos.pdf

[prydt]

Ah thank you. That is a good list although I personally dislike the "Paxos Made Moderately Complex" paper... I think it adds too many different roles for very little benefit. When implementing multi-Paxos for class, I used that paper and felt it was more trouble than it needed to be.

I'll check out the other two papers though! Also just looking around and I found this paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.2408 [PDF] which looks useful as well.

[nano_o]

The bug in the Paxos Made Simple paper is that Lamport forgot to mention that, upon accepting a proposal, an acceptor also implicitly promises not to accept any proposal in lower ballots. It's discussed at length here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29880949/contradiction-i...

[shepherdjerred]

What’s your reading group?

I took a DS class and (poorly) implemented Paxos a few years ago. I’m curious about how others continue learning about DS.