Lectures (Winter 2025 Term 2)
Slides as used in class. Lectures 10 through 14 are the consensus series: it starts from single-decree Paxos and generalizes, using set-theory quorums so that why quorum intersection works can be shown rather than asserted.
| Date | Slides |
|---|---|
| 2026-01-06 | Course framing, failure-first, GenAI and Goodhart |
| 2026-01-08 | Failure models, the network substrate, and evidence |
| 2026-01-13 | Time, ordering, and causality |
| 2026-01-15 | Global state: the problem |
| 2026-01-20 | Global state: the solution |
| 2026-01-22 | Single-node failure and recovery |
| 2026-01-27 | Two-phase commit (2PC) |
| 2026-01-29 | Coordinator failure and blocking |
| 2026-02-05 | From failure to consensus |
| 2026-02-10 | Walking the Paxos path |
| 2026-02-12 | Breaking Paxos |
| 2026-02-24 | From Paxos to Multi-Paxos |
| 2026-02-26 | Flexible Paxos |
| 2026-03-03 | Chain replication and CRAQ |
| 2026-03-05 | Consistency models and leaderless replication |
| 2026-03-10 | Byzantine fault tolerance |
| 2026-03-12 | The impossibility zoo |
| 2026-03-17 | Geo-replication and Spanner |
| 2026-03-19 | Distributed transactions |
| 2026-03-24 | Adversarial protocol design |
| 2026-03-26 | The failure model as political choice |
| 2026-03-31 | CRDTs, and consensus in different clothes |
| 2026-04-02 | Building a system that tells you it's lying |
Supporting material: