Paxos jokes

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For some reason Aleksey finds any joke about Paxos hilarious, whereas Ailidani and I are indifferent to Paxos jokes. However, today out of nowhere I came up with some decent Paxos jokes, and shared them on Twitter.  In the evening I attended the USENIX ATC reception and shared these jokes with Benjamin Reed and Alexander Shraer of ZooKeeper and ZooNet fame, and cracked them up.

Here they are for perpetuity. It is a bad idea to explain jokes. But for pedantic purposes, and to get people interested in Paxos, I provide some explanations. Paxos jokes made simple... err.. moderately complex.

I think the jokes get funnier if you read them in a Russian accent. So give that a try.


Leader - I tell you Paxos joke, if you accept me as leader.
Quorum - Ok comrade.

Leader - Here is joke! (*Transmits joke*)
Quorum - Oookay...

Leader - (*Laughs* hahaha). Now you laugh!!
Quorum - Hahaha, hahaha.


The conversation corresponds to phase 1, phase 2, and phase 3. In Paxos, the leader commits first, and tells the participants to commit via a phase 3 message.


If you followed the basic protocol, here is a riff on that.

Leader - I tell you Paxos joke, if you accept me as leader.
Quorum - Ok, but I heard "this one Paxos joke" before.

Leader - Here is joke! (*Transmits "this one Paxos joke" back.*)
Quorum - Oookay...

Leader - (*Laughs* hahaha). Now you laugh!!
Quorum - Hahaha, hahaha.


The joke here is that the leader should re-propose the same value (with the highest ballot number) that is pointed out from phase 1b message.


Here is another one.

Leader1 - I tell you Paxos joke, if you accept me as leader.
Quorum - Ok comrade.

Leader2 - I tell you Paxos joke, if you accept me as leader.
Quorum - Ok comrade.

Leader1 - No! I tell you Paxos joke.
Leader2 - No! I tell you Paxos joke.
(*dueling leaders* ... ad infinitum)

This can happen in the presence of a fully asynchronous environment, where even the diamond W failure detector is not implementable.

I have nerdier jokes for other Paxos variants, but yeah, they get more convoluted. So let's not go there.

To end the post, I have a Raft joke for you.

Well, it is really a Paxos joke, but easier to follow.

At least to some people... mostly programmers.


UPDATE: Aleksey went to the trouble of buying the PaxosJokes.com domain, and building up a website, where you can read more jokes, and submit your own jokes about Paxos protocols and distributed systems in general.

Comments

Utkarsh Behre said…
Here is a paxos Joke.

***
Leader: I tell you a spooky story if you elect me as a leader.
Quorum: Ok comrade!

Leader: Here is the spooky story! (transmits spooky story)
Quorum: Okaaay.

Leader: (gets spooked by its own story and crashes)
***

The leader dies after committing to self without being able to tell other nodes to commit.
September 26, 2019 at 12:04 AM
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