Understanding Consensus and Paxos in Distributed Systems – Chord Simple: "Now we know that the Paxos algorithm was designed to try to solve the problem of distributed consensus between a network of computers in an asynchronous system. What does the actual algorithm say? How does it get this group of machines to achieve consensus in the face of unpredictable failures?
We’ve already answered these questions (sorta) but we’ll do so here more formally by taking a sneak peek at the actual specification. Fortunately, we’ve pretty much covered the entire algorithm while constructing our auction protocol so there are very few surprises here.
Paxos uses the concepts of Proposers, Acceptors and Learners as roles in which a machine can act.
Proposers are machines with opinions. They try to impose their opinion (value) to a set of acceptors. Analogous to our auction process, these proposers are simply bidders.
Acceptors accept values proposed by proposers à la auctioneers.
Learners decide on the agreed upon value based on the acceptors acceptances. We had our bidders decide the agreed upon value (the chosen bid) in our auction. The learners simply act as external agents that declare a value to be chosen."
'via Blog this'
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