There is no distributed system without Lamport. His Time, Clocks and Ordering paper to distributed system is like Ted Codd’s A Relational Model paper to database (which is also math!). His elegant analogy between the special relativity, space-time diagram, reasoning distributed systems as state machines, and TLA+; each one is breathtaking.
Paxos is so beautiful. It’s a piece of art. It’s way more elegant and beautiful than Raft (as it solves the smallest consensus problem instead of a log). I will die on this hill.
[suddenly in a clown costume] "What kind of clown am I, claiming I can make you think better? Why should you pay attention to me?"
[in a suit] "This is not the time to be modest. I have done seminal research in the theory of concurrent and distributed systems for which I won the Turing award. You can stop the video now and look me up on the web." [long pause]
I think you maybe overstate it, but I agree Paxos is nicer than Raft. The papers in which we outlines it are awful though.
Raft is more understandable, because they wrote a paper that was easy to understand. You are much better off reading Heidi Howard to understand Paxos, than Lamport.
Lamport's early Paxos papers are interesting for a lot of reasons (I particularly like his simple textbook definition of equivalence classes in "Generalized Consensus and Paxos" (2005)), but I agree that the Paxos algorithm gets lost in all the fluff.
In 2016 some researchers at Stony Brook published the full (Multi-) Paxos algorithm using TLA+, including a couple of nice extras:
The spec is succinct enough to commit to memory and way easier to comprehend than Lamport's prose descriptions (Lamport has never specified the Paxos algorithm in TLA+, although you can find his TLA+ spec for Paxos consensus). The paper also includes a mechanically checked proof and an interesting overview of other related work.
Paxos is so beautiful. It’s a piece of art. It’s way more elegant and beautiful than Raft (as it solves the smallest consensus problem instead of a log). I will die on this hill.