Paxos: using two consensus-building phases to handle unreliable nodes

Unmesh Joshi is ready to start the New Year with a few more of his Patterns of Distributed Systems. With this one he attempts the tricky task of explaining Paxos. This is a well-known protocol developed by Leslie Lamport, for nodes to reach a reliable consensus when both they, and the network, are prone to unexpected failure. Although it's well-known, it's also notoriously difficult to understand, indeed we had considerable difficulty getting our heads around it. We hope this description makes it a bit easier for those who follow us.

more… https://martinfowler.com/articles/patterns-of-distributed-systems/paxos.html