Formal Verification of Distributed Consensus Protocols Using TLA+ for High Availability Systems
Introduction High‑availability (HA) systems are the backbone of modern digital services—think online banking, cloud storage, or real‑time collaboration tools. At the heart of most HA architectures lies a distributed consensus protocol: a set of rules that enable a cluster of nodes to agree on a single source of truth despite failures, network partitions, and asynchrony. Even a single subtle bug in a consensus algorithm can lead to data loss, split‑brain scenarios, or prolonged outages. Traditional testing (unit tests, integration tests, chaos engineering) can uncover many defects, but it can never exhaustively explore the infinite state space of a concurrent, partially‑synchronous system. ...