Paxos Made Simpler

Paxos comes up often while talking about distributed systems. A number of interesting papers refer it. I finally got an opportunity to read the Paxos paper. Here’s my attempt to make sense of it:

The problem statement:

Paxos algorithm proposes a solution to the consensus problem encountered in distributed systems.

Briefly described: how can a number of nodes in a distributed network arrive at a consensus regarding a value? This is important for nodes to have a consistent view of the data. For example: imagine you deposited $1000 in your bank account. …