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HOTDEP
2008

Consistability: Describing Usually Consistent Systems

13 years 6 months ago
Consistability: Describing Usually Consistent Systems
Current weak consistency semantics provide worst-case guarantees to clients. These guarantees fail to adequately describe systems that provide varying levels of consistency in the face of distinct failure modes, or that achieve better than worst-case guarantees during normal execution. The inability to make precise statements about consistency throughout a system's execution represents a lost opportunity to clearly understand client application requirements and to optimize systems and services appropriately. In this position paper, we motivate the need for and introduce the concept of consistability--a unified metric of consistency and availability. Consistability offers a means of describing, specifying, and discussing how much consistency a usually consistent system provides, and how often it does so. We describe our initial results of applying consistability reasoning to a keyvalue store we are developing and to other recent distributed systems. We also discuss the limitations...
Amitanand S. Aiyer, Eric Anderson, Xiaozhou Li, Me
Added 02 Oct 2010
Updated 02 Oct 2010
Type Conference
Year 2008
Where HOTDEP
Authors Amitanand S. Aiyer, Eric Anderson, Xiaozhou Li, Mehul A. Shah, Jay J. Wylie
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