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The Paxos algorithm, originally proposed by Leslie Lamport in a paper submitted in 1990 but not published until 1998, is a fault tolerant algorithm for reaching consensus in a distributed system. Within the algorithm, consensus is defined as a decision on an input value for a set of replicated state machines.

[edit] Real World Use

Google uses the Paxos algorithm in their Chubby distributed lock service in order to keep replicas consistent in case of failure. Chubby is used by Bigtable which is now in production in Google in Google Analytics and other products.

[edit] See also

• Chandra-Toueg consensus algorithm
• State machine

[edit] External links

• Yale University's Wiki article
• Leslie Lamport's history of the paper
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data