CASPaxos is a replicated state machine (RSM) protocol, an extension of Synod. Unlike Raft and Multi-Paxos, it doesn't use leader election and log replication, thus avoiding associated complexity. Its symmetric peer-to-peer approach achieves optimal commit latency in wide-area networks and doesn't cause transient unavailability when any @math of @math nodes crash. The lightweight nature of CASPaxos allows new combinations of RSMs in the designs of distributed systems. For example, a representation of a key-value storage as a hashtable with independent RSM per key increases fault tolerance and improves performance on multi-core systems compared with a hashtable behind a single RSM. This paper describes CASPaxos protocol, formally proves its safety properties, covers cluster membership change and evaluates the benefits of a CASPaxos-based key-value storage.
This paper describes the design and implementation of Egalitarian Paxos (EPaxos), a new distributed consensus algorithm based on Paxos. EPaxos achieves three goals: (1) optimal commit latency in the wide-area when tolerating one and two failures, under realistic conditions; (2) uniform load balancing across all replicas (thus achieving high throughput); and (3) graceful performance degradation when replicas are slow or crash. Egalitarian Paxos is to our knowledge the first protocol to achieve the previously stated goals efficiently---that is, requiring only a simple majority of replicas to be non-faulty, using a number of messages linear in the number of replicas to choose a command, and committing commands after just one communication round (one round trip) in the common case or after at most two rounds in any case. We prove Egalitarian Paxos's properties theoretically and demonstrate its advantages empirically through an implementation running on Amazon EC2.