On: A More Flexible Paxos

[bogomipz]

"With systems getting more and more distributed, the Paxos algorithm has been gaining popularity."

Has it though? I feel like many of the new distributed systems I read about are Raft based consensus.

[dragonwriter → bogomipz]

> Has it though?

AFAICT, Yes.

> I feel like many of the new distributed systems I read about are Raft based consensus.

Sure, and Raft has probably been gaining popularity even more than Paxos has. With more and more distributed systems and more attention on guarantees for such systems, its possible for both Paxos and Raft (and perhaps other techniques) to be getting more popular.

[rdtsc → bogomipz]

I think there is more talk on HN about Raft. It ended up in some new visible open source projects etcd, RethinkDB. Any major companies the size of Amazon or Google running on raft?

As for Paxos I think Amazon, Google (Spanner), Microsoft? have all implemented Paxos based systems are built and in production for a while. Basho has made it part of their Riak database etc.

I mean, sure if popular is just number of times it appeared on HN recently, yes, raft wins hands down. But otherwise, I think Paxos still seems like the workhorse of distributed consensus.

[seschwar → rdtsc]

> Any major companies the size of Amazon or Google running on raft?

Google's Container Engine runs Kubernetes, which uses etcd, which uses Raft.

[rdtsc → seschwar]

It runs Kubernetes for its users to run on, but does Google run its search or ad stuff on it?