文章基本信息

标题：Flexible Paxos: Quorum Intersection Revisited
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作者：Heidi Howard ; Dahlia Malkhi ; Alexander Spiegelman 等
期刊名称：LIPIcs : Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics
电子版ISSN：1868-8969
出版年度：2017
卷号：70
页码：25:1-25:14
DOI：10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2016.25
出版社：Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik
摘要：Distributed consensus is integral to modern distributed systems. The widely adopted Paxos algorithm uses two phases, each requiring majority agreement, to reliably reach consensus. In this paper, we demonstrate that Paxos, which lies at the foundation of many production systems, is conservative. Specifically, we observe that each of the phases of Paxos may use non-intersecting quorums. Majority quorums are not necessary as intersection is required only across phases. Using this weakening of the requirements made in the original formulation, we propose Flexible Paxos, which generalizes over the Paxos algorithm to provide flexible quorums. We show that Flexible Paxos is safe, e cient and easy to utilize in existing distributed systems. We discuss far reaching implications of this result. For example, improved availability results from reducing the size of second phase quorums by one when the system size is even, while keeping majority quorums in the first phase. Another example is improved throughput of replication by using much smaller phase 2 quorums, while increasing the leader election (phase 1) quorums. Finally, non intersecting quorums in either first or second phases may enhance the efficiency of both.
关键词：Paxos; Distributed Consensus; Quorums