Consensus in the Cloud: Paxos Systems Demystified
Ailidani Ailijiang, Aleksey Charapko, Murat Demirbaş · 2016
Coordination and consensus play an important role in datacenter and cloud computing, particularly in leader election, group membership, cluster management, service discovery, resource/access management, and consistent replication of the master nodes in services. Paxos protocols and systems provide a fault-tolerant solution to the distributed consensus problem and have attracted significant attention as well as generating substantial confusion. In order to elucidate the correct use of distributed coordination systems, we compare and contrast popular Paxos protocols and Paxos systems and present advantages and disadvantages for each. We also categorize the coordination use-patterns in cloud, and examine Google and Facebook infrastructures, as well as Apache top-level projects to investigate how they use Paxos protocols and systems. Finally, we analyze tradeoffs in the distributed coordination domain and identify promising future directions for achieving more scalable distributed coordination systems.