Paxos Made Simple (2001) [pdf]

"Paxos Simplified" (video & slides below) attempts to give a simple and clear explanation of Paxos. It is inspired by Leslie Lamport's paper "Paxos Made Simple".

- L9: Paxos Simplified https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRsK-ZXTeZ0

- Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ossDCdSERSZmJXKfiCwD...

Check out https://www.distributedsystemscourse.com/ by Chris Colohan for more info.

When I first started reading seminal works in Distributed Computing, I picked up the original (The Part-time Parliament) and it started off pretty well with the made up story of finding the algorithm as a manuscript from an archeological dig.

The original paper then quickly becomes super convoluted by continuing to explain the algorithm by overextending that allegory. By the mid point of it I felt pretty exhausted.

It was then I learnt that the original paper was lying in limbo for nearly a decade until it was finally published.

Then at a conference, Lamport got tired of people telling him his original was difficult to grasp and so came this simplified explanation.

I still have my notes on the paper somewhere in my Obsidian. I should publish those.

More enjoyable to read this within a broader context: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/

> The Paxos algorithm for implementing a fault-tolerant distributed system has been regarded as difficult to understand, perhaps because the original presentation was Greek to many readers.

Ha! That's very clever, author. You clearly have a similar sense of humor to...oh, it's Leslie Lamport again.

Just get llms to explain it to you; it's so much easier.