Paxos & Raft

Paxos Made Simple

Leslie Lamport

Restates Paxos stripped of the parliamentary parable, arguing the protocol itself is simple once separated from the proof that it works.

Paxos Made Live: An Engineering Perspective

Tushar D. Chandra, Robert Griesemer & Joshua Redstone

Argues 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.

The Part-Time Parliament

Leslie Lamport

The original Paxos paper: a protocol for agreeing a value among unreliable processors, told as a parable about a parliament.

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

Zab: High-performance broadcast for primary-backup systems

Flavio P. Junqueira, Benjamin C. Reed & Marco Serafini

Describes 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.

In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm

Diego Ongaro & John Ousterhout

Presents Raft, designed so that consensus can actually be taught and implemented correctly, unlike Paxos.