Consensus is fundamental to consistent, distributed systems. In order to guarantee system availability in the event of inevitable crashes, systems need a way to ensure that each node in the cluster is in alignment, such that work can seamlessly transition between nodes in the case of failures. Consensus protocols such as Paxos, Raft, and View Stamped Replication (VSR) help to drive resiliency for distributed systems by providing the logic for processes like leader election, atomic configuration changes, synchronization, and more.
