Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited

Funnily enough, there is a paper on exactly what you're referring to from Microsoft Research called "Flexible Paxos": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06696.pdf The gist of it is that there are realistically 2 quorums to be had: One for read/write to a cluster, and one for leader election. Assuming leader election is a relatively uncommon event (as it is in Paxos), you can require more quorum nodes for leader election while allowing less quorum nodes for quorum read/write. This means you get strong consistency with better performance. Distributed systems are one of my favorite things. I literally spent part of an evening with a beer reading a small handful of papers like this one. If you want an absolute treasure trove of similar works, visit the blog of Adrian Coyler: https://blog.acolyer.org/ He has a good writeup on the Flexible Paxos paper as well: https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/27/flexible-paxos-quorum-in...

I think that's a different thing... I believe you're talking about flexible paxos (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06696). Flexible paxos doesn't change the underlying guarantees at all, whereas this does.

The papers and talks[1] by Heidi Howard and Richard Mortier, in particular “Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?”[2,3] and “Flexible Paxos”[4,5], are what finally made things click for me. A real implementation also needs other stuff[6], though, such as dynamic membership and state machine replication, which I still don’t know how to do. [1] https://fpaxos.github.io/ [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3380787.3393681 or https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K6kt39wyH0 [4] https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2016.25 or https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06696 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6NG_1HM0lA [6] https://github.com/heidihoward/distributed-consensus-reading...