Paxos protocols

Paxos (computer science) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Paxos is a family of protocols for solving consensus in a network of unreliable processors. Consensus is the process of agreeing on one result among a group of participants. This problem becomes difficult when the participants or their communication medium may experience failures.[1]

Consensus protocols are the basis for the state machine approach to distributed computing, as suggested by Leslie Lamport[2]and surveyed by Fred Schneider.[3] The state machine approach is a technique for converting an algorithm into a fault-tolerant, distributed implementation. Ad-hoc techniques may leave important cases of failures unresolved. The principled approach proposed by Lamport et al. ensures all cases are handled safely.