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As a gut check, if you're solving some replication problem and you'd consider using Paxos to solve the problem, be /very/ wary and reason extremely carefully about why your weaker solution will provide the same guarantees. Chances are, it will fail in certain cases of network outage or system failure.

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And if you're considering Paxos, PaxosLease[0] is a nice, fast variation that's much less complex to actually implement in a production setting, and doesn't require co-ordinated clocks (clocks only need be consistent—monotonic—locally).

It's amazing how far you can get with a reliable leader election protocol in a distributed system. We're getting to the point where all of the other stuff is just picking specific algorithms with specific tradeoffs, much like you do today in a non-distributed setting.

[0] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.4187.pdf

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