Communications of the ACM
Replicated Data Consistency Explained Through Baseball
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Replicated storage systems for the cloud deliver different consistency guarantees to applications that are reading data. Invariably, cloud storage providers redundantly store data on multiple machines so that data remains available in the face of unavoidable failures. Replicating data across datacenters is not uncommon, allowing the data to survive complete site outages. However, the replicas are not always kept perfectly synchronized. Thus, clients that read the same data object from different servers can potentially receive different versions.
Key Insights
Some systems, like Microsoft's Windows Azure, provide only strongly consistent storage services to their applications.5 These services ensure clients of Windows Azure Storage always see the latest value that was written for a data object. While strong consistency is desirable and reasonable to provide within a datacenter, it raises concerns as systems start to offer geo-replicated services that span multiple datacenters on multiple continents.
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