Can you run Paxos correctly without understanding the paper?
Only partially. The Paxos paper describes the core voting protocol but omits critical production details: which node proposes, how to recover a stalled round, what happens when membership changes, and how to batch entries into a log. Each implementation had to reverse-engineer these gaps, often incorrectly. Raft explicitly specifies all of it.
Answered in
Why Raft Won: Consensus Built for HumansPaxos is correct but hard to understand; Raft made consensus explicit. Same guarantees, different adoption. Why comprehensibility matters in algorithms.
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