@inproceedings{21243,
  abstract     = {Widely deployed consensus protocols in the cloud are often leader-based and optimized for low latency under synchronous network conditions. However, cloud networks can experience disruptions such as network partitions, high-loss links, and configuration errors. These disruptions interfere with the operation of leader-based protocols, as their view change mechanisms interrupt the normal case replication and cause the system to stall. We propose RACS, a novel randomized consensus protocol that ensures robustness against adversarial network conditions. RACS achieves optimal one-round trip latency under synchronous network conditions while remaining resilient to adversarial network conditions. RACS follows a simple design inspired by Raft, the most widely used consensus protocol in the cloud, and therefore enables seamless integration with the existing cloud software stack. Experiments with a prototype running on Amazon EC2 show that RACS achieves 28k cmd/sec throughput, ninefold higher than Raft under adversarial cloud network conditions. Under synchronous network conditions, RACS matches the performance of Multi-Paxos and Raft, achieving a throughput of 200k cmd/sec with a median latency of 300ms, confirming that RACS introduces no unnecessary overhead. Finally, SADL-RACS, a throughput-optimized version of RACS, achieves a throughput of 500k cmd/sec, delivering 150 percent higher throughput than Raft.},
  author       = {Tennage, Pasindu and Desjardins, Antoine and Kokoris Kogias, Eleftherios},
  booktitle    = {2025 IEEE 18th International Conference on Cloud Computing},
  location     = {Helsinki, Finland},
  publisher    = {IEEE},
  title        = {{RACS-SADL: Robust and understandable randomized consensus in the cloud}},
  doi          = {10.1109/cloud67622.2025.00044},
  year         = {2025},
}