Relaxed Paxos
Heidi Carmen Howard, Richard Mortier · 2022
Distributed consensus, the ability to reach agreement in the face of failures, is a fundamental primitive for constructing reliable distributed systems. The Paxos algorithm is synonymous with consensus and widely utilized in production. Paxos uses two phases: phase one and phase two, each requiring a quorum of acceptors, to reach consensus during a round of the protocol. Traditionally, Paxos requires that all quorums, regardless of phase or round, intersect and majorities are often used for this purpose. Flexible Paxos proved that it is only necessary for phase one quorum of a given round to intersect with the phase two quorums of all previous rounds.