Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?

Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by benlivengood on Friday July 16, 2021 @03:18PM (#27860127)

Since the article mentions Google as the outlier preferring Paxos, I may be able to shed some light from a few years ago.

The Paxos, paxosdb, and related libraries (despite the name, all are multi-paxos) are solid and integrated directly into a number of products (Borg, Chubby, CFS, Spanner, etc.). There are years of engineering effort and unit tests behind the core Paxos library and so it makes sense to keep using and improving it instead of going off to Raft. As far as I am aware the Google Paxos implementation predates Raft by quite a while.

I think in general if most other people use Raft it's better for the community to have single, stable, and well-tested shared implementations for much the same reason it's good for Google to stick with Paxos.

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by tyingq on Friday July 16, 2021 @03:49PM (#27860464)

This makes sense to me. Very few of us have the resources to maintain, for example, the kind of globally synced (way beyond typical NTP) clock infrastructure that Google has (TrueTime[1]).

[1] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by gravypod on Friday July 16, 2021 @05:32PM (#27861485)

If you want to know just how hard this can be with bare metal that you control, take a look at this: https://signalsandthreads.com/clock-synchronization/

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by jeffbee on Friday July 16, 2021 @06:43PM (#27862021)

On the other hand, if you run in Google Compute Engine you get accurate clock discipline for free.

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by electricshampo1 on Friday July 16, 2021 @08:16PM (#27862583)

This is just best effort on google's end right? Don't think anything is documented/guaranteed such that you would be able to, for ex. rely on it like spanner's use of true time.

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by jeffbee on Friday July 16, 2021 @09:28PM (#27862909)

Sure, you'd have to invent the rest, but TrueTime isn't about having perfect clocks, it's about estimating the error of your peer's clocks. Having a reasonable platform clock is a good starting point, and addresses the problems discussed in the Jane Street article.

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by fred256 on Friday July 16, 2021 @07:32PM (#27862356)

> The Paxos, paxosdb, and related libraries (despite the name, all are multi-paxos) are solid and integrated directly into a number of products (Borg, Chubby, CFS, Spanner, etc.).

Maybe things have changed, but I thought the bottom turtle for pretty much any infrastructure system at Google was Chubby. I didn't realize Borg now directly does Paxos.

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by justicezyx on Friday July 16, 2021 @09:57PM (#27863019)

BorgMaster had its own consensus protocol prior to paxos lib. It was switched to paxos in 2010? (Don't quote me on this)

Chubby uses paxos. Iirc, the history is that Chubby comes first, then it's paxos code got pulled out into paxos lib, which proliferate inside Google.

And yes, Google had no other choice than Paxos at its days.

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by isubasinghe on Friday July 16, 2021 @09:46PM (#27862976)

What do you mean by bottom turtle? Chubby itself needs something like Paxos for state replication.

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Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ... by fred256 on Saturday July 17, 2021 @05:13PM (#27868914)

What I meant was that I thought any system that required some form of distributed locking or consensus, did so by building on top of Chubby (which does Paxos), not by implementing Paxos directly.

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