Constructing Scalable, Resilient and Consistent Systems with Flexible Paxos

The Paxos algorithm is a widely adopted approach to reaching agreement in unreliable asynchronous distributed systems. Since its development in 1998, Paxos has been extensively researched, taught and built upon by systems such as Chubby, Zookeeper and Raft. At its foundation, Paxos uses two phases, each requiring agreement from a majority of participants to reliably reach consensus. This session will introduce Flexible Paxos, the simple yet powerful result that each of the phases of Paxos no longer requires majority agreement. We will then demonstrate how this research opens the door to a new breed of performant, scalable and resilient distributed systems.