Paxos
A family of fault-tolerant consensus algorithms that allows a distributed system to agree on values despite crash failures and asynchronous communication.
Distributed-Systems Context
Paxos is a family of consensus protocols whose proposal numbering and quorum-intersection rules prevent two different values from being chosen for the same consensus instance despite crash failures and asynchronous communication. Multi-Paxos adds a stable-leader optimization for repeated log replication.
Implementation Boundary
The safety proof of basic Paxos is only one layer of a production system. Membership changes, persistent state, recovery, log compaction, and operational failure handling must be designed explicitly.