The Part-Time Parliament
TL;DR — Paxos, disguised as archaeology — the consensus algorithm underneath most distributed systems.
⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. Explicitly free / author-released / CC.
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 16, 2 (May 1998), 133–169, with corrections in 2000.
Lamport presented the Paxos consensus algorithm as a report on the parliamentary procedures of a fictional Greek island whose legislators wandered in and out of the chamber. The conceit was so committed that the paper was rejected, then largely ignored for years, and Lamport eventually wrote Paxos Made Simple in exasperation.
The algorithm underneath Chubby, ZooKeeper, etcd and a large fraction of distributed infrastructure. Its publication history is the best cautionary tale in computer science about mistaking style for substance — in both directions.
Where this came from
33 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.