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How to Build a Highly Available System
Using Consensus
October 1, 1996
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Download Document
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BibTex
Authors

Butler Lampson
Publication Type
Inproceedings
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
All copyrights reserved by Springer 1996.

Abstract

Related Info
Abstract
Lamport showed that a replicated deterministic state machine is a general way to implement a
highly available system, given a consensus algo-rithm that the replicas can use to agree on each
input. His Paxos algorithm is the most fault-tolerant way to get consensus without real-time
guarantees. Because general consensus is expensive, practical systems reserve it for emergencies
and use leases (locks that time out) for most of the computing. This paper explains the general
scheme for efficient highly available computing, gives a general method for understanding
concurrent and fault-tolerant programs, and derives the Paxos algorithm as an example of the
method.
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