Before anything else: what is consensus? In simple terms, it means that all parties involved in a system agree on something. For example, if you’re ordering pizza with your friends and everyone wants pepperoni but one person insists on mushrooms, there’s no consensus. But if everyone agrees to get pepperoni, then we have achieved consensus!

Now Paxos a distributed algorithm that helps us achieve consensus in systems where multiple nodes are communicating with each other over unreliable networks. The idea behind Paxos is pretty simple: it involves sending messages back and forth between the nodes until everyone agrees on what needs to be done.

Here’s how it works:

1. A node (let’s call him Bob) wants to propose a new value for something, like the price of pizza or the number of slices in a pie. He sends out a message called a “proposal” to all other nodes in the system.

2. The other nodes receive this proposal and check if they have already received another proposal with a higher sequence number (more on that later). If so, they ignore Bob’s proposal because it’s not as important as the previous one. But if there are no conflicting proposals, they send back an acknowledgement to Bob saying “hey, we heard you loud and clear!”

3. Once Bob has received enough acknowledgements (usually a majority of the nodes in the system), he can declare that his proposal is accepted and everyone else should follow suit. This is called achieving consensus!

But wait what’s this “sequence number” thing? Well, it’s basically a way to keep track of which proposals are more important than others. Each node has its own sequence number for each value being proposed, and the highest sequence number wins. If Bob proposes something with a higher sequence number than what everyone else is currently using, his proposal will be accepted instead.

It’s not exactly rocket science, but it can help us achieve consensus in distributed systems without getting into any messy fights or arguments (unless someone insists on ordering mushrooms).

Now go out there and start implementing this algorithm in your own projects! Just remember to have fun with it coding should be enjoyable, not a chore.