Paxos
Paxos is a family of consensus algorithms designed to achieve agreement among distributed systems in the presence of faults, such as network delays or node failures. It ensures that a group of processes can agree on a single value or sequence of values, making it fundamental for building reliable distributed databases and systems. The algorithm operates through a series of proposal and acceptance phases, guaranteeing safety (correctness) and liveness (progress) under asynchronous network conditions.
Developers should learn Paxos when building or working with distributed systems that require strong consistency, such as replicated state machines, distributed databases (e.g., Google Spanner), or coordination services (e.g., ZooKeeper). It is essential for scenarios where fault tolerance and agreement on data across multiple nodes are critical, such as in financial systems or cloud infrastructure, to prevent data inconsistencies and ensure system reliability.