State Machine Replication
State Machine Replication (SMR) is a fundamental distributed systems technique for achieving fault tolerance by replicating a deterministic state machine across multiple nodes. It ensures that all replicas process the same sequence of commands in the same order, leading to consistent state updates. This approach is widely used to build reliable services, such as databases and consensus protocols, that can tolerate node failures.
Developers should learn and use State Machine Replication when building highly available and fault-tolerant distributed systems, such as in financial services, cloud infrastructure, or real-time applications where consistency is critical. It is essential for implementing consensus algorithms like Paxos and Raft, which underpin distributed databases and coordination services, ensuring data integrity despite network partitions or server crashes.