Implementing Distributed Consensus

Explore the intricacies of distributed consensus in this 48-minute conference talk from SREcon19 Asia/Pacific. Dive into the Paxos protocol and learn how to design and implement a simple distributed consensus protocol using "Skinny," an education-focused distributed lock service. Gain insights into network challenges, availability, and fault-tolerance as you progress from theoretical concepts to practical coding. Ideal for engineers with limited exposure to distributed consensus, those beginning to build distributed systems, or professionals seeking to understand the underlying theory of solutions like Zookeeper and etcd. Follow along as the speaker addresses key topics including Paxos roles, coalesced roles with leader, lock and consensus APIs, propose functions, timeouts, concurrency issues, and ghost quorums. By the end, you'll have a deeper understanding of distributed consensus implementation and be equipped with resources for further learning and experimentation.

Intro
What?
Protocols
Paxos Roles
Coalesced Roles with Leader
Coalesced Roles at Scale
Limitations
Assuming a wide quorum
Lock API
Consensus API
Control API
Skinny Instance
Propose Function
Resulting Behavior
Improvement #1
Timeouts
Improvement #2
Concurrency
What's wrong?
Solution: More synchronizing
Early Stopping (3)
Ghost Quorum
The Fix
Further Reading
Try, Play, Learn!