Liberating Distributed Consensus - Heidi Howard
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an illuminating, approachable explanation of distributed consensus.
What it is
Heidi Howard's Reactive Summit 2018 talk on generalizing Paxos by weakening its original requirements. She shows Paxos is one point on a broad spectrum of consensus approaches.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2019 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jganetsk · 2020-04 · on “Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?”
Heidi Howard is incredible and her work on distributed consensus is illuminating. I think she has actually successfully cracked the cookie of "making consensus easy". [this video]
Recommends richdougherty · 2019-09 · on “The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award”
Check out Heidi Howard's work for some nice generalisations and variations of Paxos. Her approach using immutable state makes things more tractable. [LINK] [this video]
Recommends j-pb · 2020-08 · on “Keeping CALM: When Distributed Consistency Is Easy”
Tbh I think you got it backwards. CALM is actually very much about eventual consistency. The gist is basically, that distributed systems are only eventually consistent iff they are logically monotonic. Coordination as used in this article basically means "needs to be decided by an authority". But because of CALM we know that in order to elect an authority/leader, you need a consensus algorithm that actually has monotonicity at it's core, like raft. There's a really great talk on this by Heidi Howard: [this video] I actually don't think that database isolation levels are a good way to talk about this stuff, because they are practical guarantees, not theoretical ones. Snapshot isolation for example
Recommends poooogles · 2020-10 · on “A Review of Consensus Protocols”
>A more recent development is Heidi Howard's work Glad someone has mentioned her here. This talk helped me greatly [this video] .