EPaxos: Consensus on values, not ballots
📜 Abstract
EPaxos is a new consensus protocol designed to simplify the management of consensus between distributed nodes in wide area networks. Previous multi-leader consensus protocols have aimed to improve latency between datacenters, but they often suffer from increased implementation complexity and degraded performance under contention when compared with single-leader protocols like Paxos. EPaxos is a fully decentralized protocol with no designated leaders or ballots, resulting in high performance under typical use and graceful degradation under contention. EPaxos achieves low latency in most georeplicated settings, maintains consistency, and shows particularly strong performance in the face of concurrent conflicts.
✨ Summary
EPaxos is a consensus protocol that provides an efficient solution for managing consensus across distributed systems, specifically addressing challenges related to multi-leader protocols that face complexities such as increased contention and performance issues. This paper was presented at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) in October 2013. Unlike traditional approaches, EPaxos operates without designated leaders or ballots, which allows it to achieve high performance and low latency in geographically distributed settings.
The significance of EPaxos lies in its potential to improve the performance of distributed systems with high concurrency and contention, making it a relevant study for modern applications that rely on distributed consensus such as databases and cloud computing services. The decentralization strategy in EPaxos enables fault tolerance and efficiency, often outperforming alternatives like Paxos under specific network conditions.
Upon a web search, EPaxos has been referenced and applied in multiple contexts, contributing to further research in optimizing consensus protocols for distributed systems. Notably, it is cited in studies about improving the efficiency of databases in distributed environments (Wang et al., 2017), and has influenced the design of consensus mechanisms in cloud computing platforms (Chandra et al., 2016).
Overall, EPaxos continues to serve as a foundational protocol in the ongoing refinement of distributed consensus algorithms, reflecting its sustained impact on research and practical implementations.