This article looks at 'distributed consensus', that is, "is the problem of how to reach decisions in asynchronous and unreliable distributed systems." As Heidi Howard outlines, the two most widely known algorithms are Paxos (which I've covered here before) and Raft (which I thought I'd covered, but I can't find it). The difficulty with consensus algorithms is that they must not only work, they must be intuitive. We won't trust a consensus we don't understand. That's what this article is about. Howard writes, "We aim to improve performance and understandability by utilising two key weapons: generality and immutability." The new work along therse lines, 'A Generalised Solution to Distributed Consensus' (20 page PDF), "proposes an immutable and generalised approach to reaching distributed consensus over a single value." Via Colyer.
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