Test students' ability to analyze and evaluate architectural trade-offs among Paxos, Raft, and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols in large-scale distributed systems. Scope includes fault models (crash vs Byzantine), safety and liveness guarantees, performance metrics (latency, throughput, scalability), operational complexity (leader election, reconfiguration, monitoring, recovery), and deployment cost/assumptions. Questions should require scenario-based decisions and justification for protocol selection given network conditions, failure modes, security threats, and resource constraints.