Episode 377: Heidi Howard on Distributed Consensus

Heidi Howard, a researcher in the field of distributed systems, discusses distributed consensus.  Heidi explains when we need it, when we don’t need and the algorithms we use to achieve it.  Adam Gordon Bell spoke with Heidi about the history of distributed consensus, paxos and variations on it, such as raft and flexible paxos, performance and scaling of distributed consensus, CAP Theorem, scaling consensus, TLA+, important papers in the field, what algorithms are used by real world systems like zookeeper and etcd and the verification of these algorithms.  Heidi also discusses what it is like to be a researcher in the field of distributed systems, how algorithms are verified and how she got into the field.

Related Links

• The Future of Distributed Consensus
• Kyle Kingsbury on validating Distributed Consensus
• Leslie Lamport, Paxos creator
• Google’s Paxos Made Live Paper
• Paxos Made Moderately Complex (PDF)
• The TLA+ Home Page
• Linearizability results
• Isabell Theorem prover

SE Radio theme: “Broken Reality” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com — Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0)

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