Cloud Storage Services: A Model of (In)Consistency

Summary form only given. Cloud storage systems invariably replicate data for high availability and low latency access. Application designers, as well as cloud providers, must deal with trade-offs between consistency, performance, and availability. Some cloud services provide strong data consistency to their clients while others have chosen eventual consistency. Increasingly, systems are offering a choice of consistency when reading shared data. This talk examines the implications of such a choice and explores a broader class of consistency guarantees that can, and perhaps should, be provided within the cloud.