I just started reading about distributed systems for the first time ever. There is a fairly slick proof of the impossibility of consensus in an asynchronous model using some combinatorial topology. On the other hand, there are multiple consensus protocols used in practical systems to synchronize distributed state machines like Paxos and Raft. It seems like the key to this perceived contradiction is what is called failure detection.My question is the following: What does protocols like Paxos and Raft give up, i.e. how are they not contradicting the theorem? How does failure detection fit in here?Are there any papers that discuss these relationships that are worth looking at?
Consensus problem of distributed systems
distributed systems