Existential consistency
Haonan Lu, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Philippe Ajoux, Jim Hunt, Yee Jiun Song, Wendy Tobagus, Sanjeev Kumar, Wyatt Lloyd · 2015
Replicated storage for large Web services faces a trade-off between stronger forms of consistency and higher performance properties. Stronger consistency prevents anomalies, i.e., unexpected behavior visible to users, and reduces programming complexity. There is much recent work on improving the performance properties of systems with stronger consistency, yet the flip-side of this trade-off remains elusively hard to quantify. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work does so for a large, production Web service.