# Viewstamped Replication: The Less-Famous Consensus Protocol

DevFeed: [Viewstamped Replication: The Less-Famous Consensus Protocol](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/viewstamped-replication-the-less-famous-consensus-protocol-12457.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://brooker.co.za/blog/2014/05/19/vr.html>)

Author: Marc Brooker

Published: 2014-05-19T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Marc Brooker's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/marc-brooker-s-blog.md>), [Marc Brooker's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/marc-brooker-s-blog-2.md>)

Topics: [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/distributed-systems.md>), [Replication](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/replication.md>), [Raft](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/raft.md>), [Algorithms](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/algorithms.md>), [Protocol (disambiguation)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/protocol.md>)

Tags: [algorithms](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/algorithms.md>), [comparison](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/comparison.md>), [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed-systems.md>), [raft](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/raft.md>), [replication](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/replication.md>)

## AI overview

The article contrasts Paxos, Raft, and the less-famous Viewstamped Replication as distributed consensus protocols. It presents Viewstamped Replication, introduced in the 1980s, as historically comparable to Paxos and explains differences in how Paxos and Viewstamped Replication handle consensus, view changes, and data replication.

## Source excerpt

Viewstamped Replication: The Less-Famous Consensus Protocol The first practical consensus protocol may be the least famous. There's no doubt that Paxos is the most famous distributed consensus protocol. Distributed systems reading lists (such as this one by Dan Creswell and this one by Christopher Meiklejohn) nearly all include at least one paper describing it. That's as it should be. There's no doubt Paxos has been extremely influential in industry, and has formed the basis of many extremely successful systems. Lamport's Paxos Made Simple is very readable, and papers like Google's Paxos Made Live have helped raise the visibility of good Paxos implementation techniques. Raft, on the other hand, is the most fashionable distributed consensus protocol. It seems like everybody's implementing it right now. I don't know if it's as understandable as it claims to be, but it's definitely in vogue. While I'm not a big fan of technology fads, I find it difficult to be upset about this one. Anything that encourages people to use well-proven distributed algorithms instead of crafting their own is good in my book. By comparison to Paxos and Raft, one distributed consensus protocol seems frequently overlooked: Oki and Liskov's Viewstamped Replication. Introduced in May 1988 in Brian Oki's PhD thesis, Viewstamped Replication predates the first publication of Paxos by about a year. If you're looking for intrigue you may be disappointed: both Lamport and Liskov claim the inventions were independent. First, from Viewstamped Replication Revisited: VR was originally developed in the 1980s, at about the same time as Paxos, but without knowledge of that work. and from Keith Marzullo's comments in the 1998 reprinting of The Part-Time Parliament: The author was also apparently unaware that the view management protocol by Oki and Liskov seems to be equivalent to the Paxon protocol. In many ways, the Paxos protocol as described in The Part-Time Parliament and the Viewstamped Replication proto