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How to Build a Highly Available System
Without a Toolkit
May 1, 1995
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Download Document
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BibTex
Authors
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Butler Lampson
Publication Type
Inproceedings
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Abstract
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Related Info
Abstract
Presentation: In this talk I will describe the general recipe for building a highly available system
and show how to do it efficiently in practice. The idea is to build a replicated state machine. The
tricky part is getting all the replicas to agree on the content and order of the inputs. For this you
need a general fault-tolerant algorithm for reaching consensus. Two-phase commit uses the
simplest possible such algorithm, but I will describe Lamport’s “Paxos” algorithm, which is the
best one that works without real-time guarantees. Since consensus is expensive, you also need to
minimize its use, and you do that with leases, which are locks that time out. The other theme of
the talk is a general method for designing or understanding a complex system, especially a
concurrent or fault-tolerant one. Using the Paxos algorithm as the example, I will show you how
to write a precise spec for such a system and how to prove that an implementation satisfies the
spec. There won’t be any formulas in the talk.
Related Info
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 consensus.pdf
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 Algorithms
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 Microsoft Research Lab - Redmond
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