> "Consensus is a problem that has plagued computer science phd’s for literally decades"
No, not really. The Paxos paper was in 1989. One might reasonably argue that Raft is an improvement, but if so it's only an incremental one - not a cure for a "plague" as the author suggests.
The problem with consensus for PhDs is not that Paxos doesn't solve it. The problem is that it is SO hard to understand.
Notably, soon after Lamport's 1998 Paxos paper he published Paxos Made Simple[1] which noted The Paxos algorithm for implementing a fault-tolerant distributed system has been regarded as difficult to understand
This paper was supposed to make it simpler, but it wasn't enough. When the Raft paper was release, the title was In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm[2] which noted the following:
most implementations of consensus are based on Paxos or influenced by it, and Paxos has become the primary vehicle used to teach students about consensus. Unfortunately, Paxos is quite difficult to understand,in spite of numerous attempts to make it more approachable. Furthermore, its architecture requires complex changes
to support practical systems. As a result, both system
builders and students struggle with Paxos
I'd say that is reasonable evidence to suggest that, yes, consensus really has plagued computer science phd’s for decades.
Additionally, I'd note that the famous maxim There are only two hard problems in computer science: Naming things and Cache Invalidation (and off-by-one errors) basically refers to the difficulties in establishing distributed consensus in both the "naming things" and "cache invalidation" cases.
No, not really. The Paxos paper was in 1989. One might reasonably argue that Raft is an improvement, but if so it's only an incremental one - not a cure for a "plague" as the author suggests.
The problem with consensus for PhDs is not that Paxos doesn't solve it. The problem is that it is SO hard to understand.
Notably, soon after Lamport's 1998 Paxos paper he published Paxos Made Simple[1] which noted The Paxos algorithm for implementing a fault-tolerant distributed system has been regarded as difficult to understand
This paper was supposed to make it simpler, but it wasn't enough. When the Raft paper was release, the title was In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm[2] which noted the following:
most implementations of consensus are based on Paxos or influenced by it, and Paxos has become the primary vehicle used to teach students about consensus. Unfortunately, Paxos is quite difficult to understand,in spite of numerous attempts to make it more approachable. Furthermore, its architecture requires complex changes to support practical systems. As a result, both system builders and students struggle with Paxos
I'd say that is reasonable evidence to suggest that, yes, consensus really has plagued computer science phd’s for decades.
Additionally, I'd note that the famous maxim There are only two hard problems in computer science: Naming things and Cache Invalidation (and off-by-one errors) basically refers to the difficulties in establishing distributed consensus in both the "naming things" and "cache invalidation" cases.
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
[2] http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/raft-atc14