Awesome Consensus

Overview

A curated selection of artisanal consensus algorithms and hand-crafted distributed lock services. This repository covers Paxos, Raft, and other consensus protocols used in distributed systems.

Consensus Algorithms

Paxos Family

• Classic Paxos - Original consensus algorithm
• Multi-Paxos - Optimized variant for multiple decisions
• Fast Paxos - Lower latency variant
• Flexible Paxos - Generalized quorum requirements
• Egalitarian Paxos (EPaxos) - Leaderless consensus

Raft

• Understandable consensus algorithm
• Leader-based approach
• Strong consistency guarantees

Byzantine Fault Tolerant

• PBFT - Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Tendermint - BFT consensus for blockchains
• HotStuff - Modern BFT protocol

Other Protocols

• Zab - ZooKeeper Atomic Broadcast
• Viewstamped Replication
• Chain Replication

Features

• Research papers and specifications
• Production implementations
• Visualization tools
• Performance comparisons
• Testing frameworks

Production Systems Using Consensus

• Google Spanner - Uses Paxos
• Apache ZooKeeper - Uses Zab
• etcd - Uses Raft
• Consul - Uses Raft
• CockroachDB - Uses Raft

Use Cases

• Distributed configuration management
• Leader election
• Distributed locks
• Replicated state machines
• Strongly consistent databases

Pricing

Free and open-source algorithms and implementations.