The road to Paxos is a long one (as with other greek islands) and also somewhat elusive (it’s an island, after all). It took me longer than I’d like to admit to obtain a working understanding of the Paxos protocol. In my early attempts, I’d hit a brick wall of complexity: do I really need to know what this particular acceptor is going to do? What’s a learner anyway? What does it even mean to decide a value? Why do I need all these ballot numbers? In systems, we deal with complexity vi...| mahesh’s blog