Paxos, Raft and Distributed Consensus
Consensus connects a compact safety argument to a substantial amount of engineering. Begin with Raft's decomposition of a replicated log, then use Paxos Made Simple to isolate the problem of choosing a value. The original Paxos paper adds historical context and a fuller presentation. Paxos Made Live shows what implementing a dependable service required beyond the algorithm, while Zab provides another perspective on primary-backup broadcast and recovery. Reconfiguration finishes the sequence by changing the participants themselves. This is an intermediate-to-advanced path for readers comfortable with concurrency. Track safety, liveness, and failure assumptions separately, and draw a message trace before deciding that two protocols provide the same behavior. Curated from collections by Dan Creswell (https://dancres.github.io/Pages/) and Fred Hébert (https://ferd.ca/a-distributed-systems-reading-list.html); commentary and reading order are original.