Read the following papers:

• Leslie Lamport, “The Part-Time Parliament”, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 16(2), pp. 133-169, May 1998.
• Tushar Chandra, Robert Griesemer, Joshua Redstone, “Paxos made live: an engineering perspective”, In Proceeding of the ACM International Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), 2007.

Briefly summarize:

• What Paxos algorithm is
• How it works (at a high level)
• What real-world problems can be solved using it