Paxos is a protocol that Leslie Lamport and others have written extensively about. The most succinct paper describing Paxos is published by Lamport in 2001. The original paper “The Part-Time Parliment” was published in 1989.

Unlike Raft, which represents a relatively concrete protocol, Paxos represents a family of protocols. Each variant has different tradeoffs.

• Multi Paxos: Allow the protocol to handle a stream of messages with less overhead than Basic Paxos.
• : Reduce the number of round trips in exchange for reduced fault tolerance.
• Raft: Described in the next chapter.
  It has been noted in the industry that Paxos is notoriously difficult to learn. Algorithms such as Raft are designed deliberately to be more easy to understand.

Due to complexities in the protocol, and the range of possibilities, it can be difficult to ascertain the state of a system when things go wrong (or are going right).