Distributed System Design - Consensus

Consensus Algorithms

• Raft
  • the newer, easier to understand algorithm
  • https://raft.github.io/
  • interactive tutorial:http://thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/
• Paxo
  • the "classic" algorithm. For lightweight transactions in cassandra, bigtable’s chubby lock manager.
• zab: zookeeper's algorithm
• blockchain

Use cases

Coordination service，distributed configuration store.

• Leader selection (primary/slave selection)
• Distributed locking
• Task queue / producer consumer queue
• Metadata store: as a storage service for some classes of data
• as a name server
• System-wide Configeration
• fast to roll out(comparing to code push)