Implementing Distributed Consensus

Explore the intricacies of distributed consensus in this 40-minute conference talk from SREcon20 Americas. Dive into the Paxos protocol and design a simple distributed consensus protocol using "Skinny," an education-focused distributed lock service. Gain insights into implementing the protocol, addressing challenges in network, availability, and fault-tolerance. Progress from theoretical concepts to practical coding, making this talk ideal for engineers with limited exposure to distributed consensus, those beginning to build distributed systems, or professionals seeking to understand the underlying theory behind solutions like Zookeeper and etcd. Learn about sequential requests, timeouts, concurrent requests, and cancelling global contexts while working through small challenges to solidify your understanding.

Intro
What is Distributed Consensus
Skinny Chrome
What happens when something fails
Implementation
Reaching Out
Sequential Requests
Timeouts
Concurrent Requests
Cancelling Global Context
Ghost Program
Sources