Determining the order of events in a distributed system isn’t straightforward, as the concept of “now” is relative. This article explores the challenges of achieving consensus in distributed systems and why relying on proven algorithms like Raft or Paxos may be essential.

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One of the editions of Resilience Roundup, which is a newsletter dedicated to the topic of systems resilience, compiled by Thai Wood, talks about a paper from MIT’s Nancy Leveson called “The Role of Software in Spacecraft Accidents”. In this paper, the author studied five prominent disasters in aerospace industry with relation to software. Thai Wood does a much better job of summarizing the paper than I would, so I will not go over the whole paper here.

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