The Part-Time Parliament

Before you start

Assumes

Lamport on ordering first, and tolerance for an extended allegory about a Greek island

FreeAdvancedlink checked 17 Sept 2026

Read these first

Not a difficulty warning — a route. These are in the library too.

• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed SystemLeslie Lamport, 1978Defines happened-before and logical clocks, giving distributed systems a usable notion of order without shared time.

If this is the wrong level

Groundwork for

Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.

• Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed DatabaseJames C. Corbett et al., 2012Uses synchronised clocks with bounded uncertainty to offer externally consistent distributed transactions across datacentres.
• There Is More Consensus in Egalitarian ParliamentsIulian Moraru, David G. Andersen & Michael Kaminsky, 2013Shows that commands whose effects commute need not be ordered by a single leader at all, letting any replica commit them in parallel while still preserving consensus guarantees.
• Paxos Made Live: An Engineering PerspectiveTushar D. Chandra, Robert Griesemer & Joshua Redstone, 2007Argues the gap between the Paxos algorithm and a production consensus system is itself substantial engineering, covering leader election, disk corruption and group membership changes the original paper leaves unspecified.
• Zab: High-performance broadcast for primary-backup systemsFlavio P. Junqueira, Benjamin C. Reed & Marco Serafini, 2011Describes the atomic broadcast protocol behind ZooKeeper, built around a primary that establishes an order once and lets followers simply replay it, rather than Paxos's per-value agreement.
• Viewstamped Replication RevisitedBarbara Liskov & James Cowling, 2012Restates the original 1988 primary-backup replication protocol in a form directly comparable to Paxos, arguing it solves the same problem with a simpler view-change mechanism.
• The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systemsMike Burrows, 2006Argues most distributed systems need a small, highly available lock and naming service rather than a full consensus library, and that hiding Paxos behind a simple lock API is what made it usable in practice.