Making Democracy Work: Fixing and Simplifying Egalitarian Paxos

The article discusses the challenges with traditional state-machine replication protocols like Paxos that rely on a single leader, leading to potential failures and increased latency. Egalitarian Paxos introduced a leaderless approach to address these issues, but it was complex and prone to bugs. The authors propose EPaxos* as a simpler and correct variant of Egalitarian Paxos, with a more straightforward failure-recovery algorithm. This new protocol covers a wider range of failure thresholds and is proven to be optimal for a certain number of processes.