Replicated State Machine via Consensus

At the beginning of this chapter, we briefly described how a consensus algorithm could be used to solve a wide variety of problems.

This is not a coincidence since all these problems share a common, fundamental characteristic. This is the fact that they can all be modeled as a state machine to some extent. This is also the reason why it’s easier to solve them in a centralized setting, but it gets much harder when we want to solve them in a distributed setting in order to increase availability.