Making Democracy Work: Fixing and Simplifying Egalitarian Paxos | Hacker News Reader

Making Democracy Work: Fixing and Simplifying Egalitarian Paxos

arxiv.org

180 pointsotrack56 comments

otrack et al.: Thank you and congratulations! It's gratifying seeing the wheels of research make progress.

My appreciation of formal and machine-checked proofs has grown since we wrote the original EPaxos paper; I was delighted at the time at the degree to which Iulian was able to specify the protocol in TLA+, but now in hindsight wish we (or a later student) had made the push to get the recovery part formalized as well, so perhaps we'd have found these issues a decade ago. Kudos for finding and fixing it.

Have you yourselves considered formalizing your changes to the protocol in TLA+? I wonder if the advances the formal folks have made over the last decade or so would ease this task. Or, perhaps better yet -- one could imagine a joint protocol+implementation verification in a system like Ironfleet or Verus, which would be tremendously cool and also probably a person-year of work. :)

Edited to add: This would probably make a great masters thesis project. If y'all are not already planning on going there, I might drop the idea to Bryan Parno and see if we find someone one of these years who would be interested in verifying/implementing your fixed version in Verus. Let me know (or if we start down the path I'll reach out).

I can’t speak for the authors, but I have been lucky enough to be collaborating with them on behalf of the Apache Cassandra project, to refine and prove the correctness of the Accord protocol - a derivative of EPaxos we have integrated into the database.

It would be fantastic if such a project could be pursued for this variant, which has the distinction of being the only “real world” implementation.

Either way, thank you for the original EPaxos paper - it has been a privilege to convert its intuitions into a practical system.

msc thesis only left. happy to do it with a twist. training an ml model to speed up proof generation and verification.

can you share more?

Thank you, dgacmu! We are currently working on a TLA+ specification with master's students, and we plan to verify it with TLC and Apalache. I discovered that Iulian's TLA+ specification was missing a ballot variable [1] by injecting a trace, because exhaustive exploration was not tractable. Therefore, state-space explosion is likely to become a problem (systems of interest contain 7–9 processes with non‑transitive conflicts). In that case, intermediate abstractions will be necessary, which may naturally lead us to theorem proving.

Once the specification is ready, I'll post about it here. :)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10917

A cited paper's title is "There is more consensus in Egalitarian parliaments." Are terms like "democracy" and "parliament" common terms in distributed computing theory? Or are these intentionally clickbaity/humorous paper titles?

The original Paxos paper was termed "The Part-Time Parliament", and was explained -- I'm serious here -- not as a distributed systems protocol, but as a discussion about how electors on a Greek island could vote despite wandering in and out of the room. (Lamport). It set the stage for a series of papers using that theme. We continued on that theme when picking the title for the EPaxos paper, and these folks built on that. So yeah, it's a bit of a thing specifically in the paxos literature.

And wait until I tell you about the Byzantine Generals Problem. :-)

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/byz.pdf , for those who lack patience.

Thank you for explaining!

One of the big gaps in Raft is that it’s hard to manage leader election on a heterogenous network. Everyone has or knows a story about the tiny branch office we keep for the CTO’s nephew or that engineer who decided to move to Colorado and quit if he couldn’t work from there, getting elected leader and the whole system limping to a halt.

In the case of Raft it would benefit I think from having an instant runoff election process. Where three nodes are nominated and everyone votes on which one has the best visibility.

At the very least I can see a way to use latency to determine who to vote for, to manage a fast election instead of timeouts and retries.

If a node thinks it's better suited as leader, it can always force an election immediately for the next term. Things could go badly if you're wrong though

There are variants that have members than can vote but can’t lead, and I believe also ones where there are silent shareholders that are aware of part of the state of the system but don’t vote. Those would be particularly useful for autoscaling groups, where you’re not affecting the quorum count.

I think consul’s sidecar works this way but I’ve ever set it up, only used it.

I'm struggling to grasp this paper. The title makes it sound like its talking about democratic processes in the real world but then reading makes me think its a technical paper on computing. Then the comments talk about a mix.

Is anyone able to provide a simple overview of whats being covered here? To me it seems impossible to run a government with no leader and humans having to vote on everything and trust each other. It would be very inefficient not having someone to break ties and make executive choices.

“Classical state-machine replication protocols, such as Paxos, rely on a distinguished leader process to order commands.”

Isn’t that multi-Paxos? Paxos is leaderless.

Very odd opening sentence.

In practice, almost every implementation of Paxos uses multi-paxos. Even the "Paxos Made Simple" paper notes:

> In normal operation, a single server is elected to be the leader, which acts as the distinguished proposer (the only one that tries to issue proposals) in all instances of the consensus algorithm.

because otherwise you don't have a mechanism for ordering; the more basic Paxos protocol only discusses how to arrive at consensus for a single proposal, not how to assign numbers to them in a reasonable way that preserves ordering.

“Paxos” is a term that can mean many different things, so it’s better not to get too attached to any one meaning especially in different contexts.

Multi Paxos is commonly used (especially in industry) as short hand for multi decree Paxos (in contrast to single decree Paxos), but “Paxos” most often refers to the family of protocols, all of which are typically implemented with a leader. It is confusing of course because single decree Paxos is used to implement EPaxos (and its derivatives).

It’s worth noting also that Lamport is (supposedly) on the record as having intended “Paxos” to refer to the protocol incorporating the leader optimisation.

Author here.

Lamport simply calls his protocol "Paxos" to refer to both the single‑decree and multi‑decree versions. This is also the case in his other works, e.g., "Fast Paxos" and "Generalized Paxos." The term "Multi‑Paxos" is a later community/industry shorthand for the repeated or optimized use of single‑decree Paxos.

* As others have pointed out, Paxos is leaderless. Electing a leader is a performance trick (reduce contention/retries), not a correctness trick - if you want to order your events.

* EPaxos appears to relax ordering as long as the clients can declare their event-dependencies.

Q1) If I withdraw from ATM 1 and someone else withdraws from ATM 2, we are independent consumers - so how do we possibly coordinate which withdrawal depends on the other?

Q2) Assuming that's not a problem, how do I get the ability to replay events? If the nodes don't care about order (beyond constraints), how can I re-read events 1-100, suffer a node outage, and resume reading events 101-200 from a replacement node?

I'm not sure I understand Q1 - that's exactly the point: If you withdraw _from your account_ and customer B withdraws from _their_ account, then the two events are unrelated and can be executed in either order (and, in fact, replicas would still have the same state even if some executed AB and some BA).

The replay is part of what the authors fixed in the original protocol. I believe but need to read their protocol in more detail on Monday that the intuition for this is that when there's an outage and you bring a new node online, the system commits a Nop operation that conflicts with everything. This effectively creates a synchronization barrier that that forces re-reading all of the previous commits.

But I'm confused about the phrasing of your question because the actor isn't clear here when you say "I re-read events 1-100" -- which actor is "I"? Remember that a client of the system doesn't read "events", it performs operations, such as "read the value of variable X". In other words, clients perform operations that observe _state_, and the goal of the algorithm is to ensure that the state at the nodes is consistent according to a specific definition of consistency.

So if a client is performing operations that involve a replacement node, the client contacts the node to read the state, and the node is responsible for synchronizing with the state as defined by the graph of operations conflicting with the part of the state requested by the client, which will include _all_ operations prior to the replacement of the node due to the no-op.

I forget the term, it might be Dependency Graph.

Hypothetically lets say there's a synchronized quantum every 60 seconds. Order of operations might not matter if transactions within that window do not touch any account referenced by other transactions.

However every withdrawal is also a deposit. If Z withdraws from Y, and Y withdraws from X, and X also withdraws from Z there's a related path.

Order also matters if any account along the chain would reach an 'overdraft' state. The profitable thing for banks to do would be to synchronously deduct the withdrawals first, then apply them to maximize the overdraft fees. A kind thing would be the inverse, assume all payments succeed and then go after the sources. Specifying the order of applied operations, including aborts, in the case of failures is important.

Those transfers would be represented as having dependencies on both accounts they touch, and so would be forced to be ordered.

Transfer(a, b, $50)

And

Transfer(b, c, $50)

Are conflicting operations. They don't commute because of the possibility that b could overdraft. So the programmer would need to list (a, b) as the dependencies of the first transaction and (b, c) as the second. Doing so would prevent concurrent submission of these transactions from being executed on the fast path.

As I was implying with chains after the toy example, the issue of ordering matters when there's a long sequence of operations that touches many accounts. How easy is it to track all of the buckets touched when for every source there could be a source upstream from any other transaction?

A temporary table could hold that sort of data in a format that makes sense for rolling back the related transactions and then replying them 'on the slow path' (if order matters).

Between their two questions, I'm guessing more directly what they're getting at is if events 100 and 101 can be reordered, what's the guarantee that reconnecting doesn't end up giving you event 100 twice and skipping 101?

[Edit, rereading] Shortened down, just this part is probably it:

> which will include _all_ operations prior to the replacement of the node due to the no-op.

Sounds like a graph merge, not actually a replay.

> I'm not sure I understand Q1 - that's exactly the point: If you withdraw _from your account_ and customer B withdraws from _their_ account

Same account.

> the actor isn't clear here when you say "I re-read events 1-100" -- which actor is "I"?

The fundamental purpose of Paxos is that different actors will come to a consensus. If different actors see different facts, no consensus was reached, and Paxos wasn't necessary.

If it's the same account, the two operations will have the same dependencies, and thus the system will be forced to order them the same at all replicas.

The two commands affect the same account balance, so they don't commute, so these commands conflict. Every EPaxos worker is required to be able to determine whether any two commands are conflicting, in this case it would be something like:

def do_commands_conflict(c1): return len(write(c1) & read(c2)) > 0 or len(write(c2) & read(c1)) > 0 or len(write(c1) & write(c2)) > 0

Whenever an EPaxos node learns about a new command, it compares it to the commands that it already knows about. If it conflicts with any current commands, then it gains a dependency on them (see Figure 3, "received PreAccept"). So the commands race; the first node to learn about both of them is going to determine the dependency order [in some cases, two nodes will disagree on the order that the conflicting commands were received -- this is what the "Slow Path" is for].

The clients don't coordinate this; the EPaxos nodes choose the order. The cluster as a whole guarantees linearity. This just means that there's at least one possible ordering of client requests that would produce the observed behavior; if two clients send requests concurrently, there's no guarantee of who goes first.

(in particular, the committed dependency graph is durable, even though it's arbitrary, so in the event of a failure/restart, all of the nodes will agree on the dependency graph, which means that they'll always apply non-commuting commands in the same order)

There is a recurring trend of interpreting democracy to mean "leaderless consensus-based decision-making", which really doesn't work and never has. That's why Occupy and pretty much every other similar bottom-up movement failed: leaders are necessary. People follow other people, not algorithms or groups.

"Making democracy work" should be about training better leaders and getting them into the system.

I think EU federation is pretty good, but I feel very dumbfounded every time dumb decisions that do not benefit member states are made, too much empathy too early I guess.

The EU is pretty good at its intended purpose, which is to tie together European countries in a non-hostile and economically-productive way.

But it seems pretty obviously not very good at any real executive action. Which is, again, by design.

not having elected 'idiots' run a highly complex government structure

I wouldn't say so. The first years of the largest war in Europe since WWII have shown that a leaderless EU is incapable of making important decisions crucial to its own survival, as a fallen Ukraine would have led to a divided EU where many countries would be governed by authoritarian fascist regimes, such as the one in Hungary led by Orban.

I feel like you're a bit tendentious and exaggerated in your assessments.

People don't get a say in the people's decision that they didn't elect. I thought it's pretty spot on.

How do you think the EU (con)federation is pretty good given the remaining of your comment?

Occupy did not fail, it successfully shifted the entire national political conversation of the United States toward considerations of the class warfare being waged by the wealthy against the general population in ways that are continuing to publicly echo in campaigns and policy discussion ever since

The fact they get brought up in such conversations still is proof of that, however i would counter that they failed in their main stated objectives and were dismantled, beaten, even ridiculed in public for it. They became a stark reminder that the rich are far too powerful.

Ridicule is part of the process of folding a series of ideas into mainstream thought

Democracy which is all about "leaders" is not democracy. Find another word.

Electing or choosing leaders is how democratic systems have functioned, in one way or another, since the beginning of the concept.

Then it has never existed.

It is commonly recognized that Democracy could not exist at a granularity where everyone verifiably gets to contribute to every decision (even if only to abstain), including throughout the resolution of unsettled downstream decisions during implementation of settled upstream decisions.

This is very much not a surprise to anyone.

For any Democratic system to work, it must include systems of delegation.

One can usefully talk about tradeoffs of different kinds, granularity, processes and limits of delegation.

Is this democracy according to the math department? This does not conflict with the claim I made.

Exactly and that's why the US should be called a Constitutional Republic. At state level it's often much more democratic but federally, the US is not a (direct) democracy and shouldn't be called so by the media in matra-like manner. Watching CNN or MSNBC with bourbon shots on "democracy" is a drinking game that typically won't last the evening.

> "Making democracy work" should be about training better leaders and getting them into the system.

AND fixing the (fundamentally broken) system by reducing the influence of money.

"Reducing the influence of money" is fairly inconsistent with what money is. If anyone can influence anything in any way then having money is going to help them do it.

What you need is a way to reduce corruption, i.e. create a structure where diverting public funds to special interests or passing laws that limit competition can be vetoed by someone with the right structural incentives to actually prevent it.

I can't tell if you're being pedantic, or somehow misunderstood my point. To be painfully crystal clear, I meant "reducing the influence of money [ON ELECTIONS, via eg campaign finance reform, and/or related measures designed to correct the structural problems that currently make it corrupt by default]"

You are confusing "democracy as used colloquially for government" and "democracy as used by computer scientists to design systems that still work on failure prone networks"

>Egalitarian Paxos introduced an alternative, leaderless approach, that allows replicas to order commands collaboratively.

This is exactly how bitcoin works.

Every 10 minutes the network elects a leader to assort & order transactions and also throw out fraudulent transactions.

If he fails to do this, he is not allow to claim his block reward (technically the "coinbase" transaction)

I keep telling people the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

Its hard to explain comprehensively and what's strange is that no one has written a thorough book on the topic.

I am happy there are people actually writing such material on this topic.

Albeit its a bit too technical.

Computer science is the future of politics & governance. (I don't think AI is any useful but rather distributed systems)

> the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

That just sounds like robber barons with extra steps?

you don't understand why technology of public ledgers would benefit public ledgers?

Please go on

> you don't understand why technology of public ledgers would benefit public ledgers?

I do understand that but public ledgers benefiting themselves isn't the point, benefiting the public is, and you seem to imply it - if you don't, please ignore the rest of this comment.

I'd like to join paulryanrogers and ask for a proof because I don't see the public benefits of bitcoin - aiding criminals is the opposite of that.

>> Egalitarian Paxos introduced an alternative, leaderless approach...

> Every 10 minutes the network elects a leader to...

From that it sounds like it is completely different to how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin "elects" a leader node once every so often and this paper claims its protocol does not have a leader node. It is pretty easy to imagine a day passing in the Bitcoin world where one node is in control of all the transactions for that day with no ability for any other peer miner to have any influence at all in what transactions end up in the blockchain.

> the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

“Hi everyone, I’m here to excitedly talk about the hyper-capitalist-hellscape I’d like to sell you all! Wait, why are you all leaving?”

I wish for a talk about market failures and possible solutions instead.

The network does not elect a leader. that is a mischaracterization of the PoW process.

It's not like you are hashing based on your public key or something and then you get to sign a block afterwards. You have to commit to a block template before every hash. And also the miner is decided randomly by a weighted hashrate.

Imagine applying this to anything else. The group with the most (extremely specialized) computer power just gets to decide everything?

> I keep telling people the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

I hope that you don't mean just things related to cryptocurrencies, because as soon as you demand monetary investment for something, it ceases to be democratic.

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