Distributed Systems and Algorithms for the Working Engineer

Two Phase Commit: Indistinguishable Commit Scenario

18 November 2021

We review the most interesting failure scenario for the Two Phase Commit (2PC) protocol. There are excellent explanations of 2PC out there, and I won’t bother too much with the basic explanation. The focus of this post is a walkthrough of the indistinguishable state scenario, where neither a global commit, nor a global abort command can be issued.

Tags: Distributed Systems