Marc's Blog About Me My name is Marc Brooker. I've been writing code, reading code, and living vicariously through computers for as long as I can remember. I like to build things that work. I also dabble in brewing, cooking and skiing. I'm currently an engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Seattle, where I lead engineering on AWS Lambda and our other serverless products. Before that, I worked on EC2 and EBS. All opinions are my own. And it looks pretty hard. In his classic paper How to Build a Highly Available System Using Consensus Butler Lampson laid out a pattern that's become very popular in the design of large-scale highly-available systems. Consensus is used to deal with unusual situations like host failures (Lampson says