Deconstructing paxos

Abstract

The celebrated Paxos algorithm of Lamport implements a fault-tolerant deterministic service by replicating it over a distributed message-passing system. This paper presents a deconstruction of the algorithm by factoring out its fundamental algorithmic principles within two abstractions: an eventual leader election and an eventual register abstractions. In short, the leader election abstraction encapsulates the liveness property of Paxos whereas the register abstraction encapsulates its safety property. Our deconstruction is faithful in that it preserves the resilience and efficiency of the original Paxos algorithm in terms of stable storage logs, message complexity, and communication steps. In a companion paper, we show how to use our abstractions to reconstruct powerful variants of Paxos.