Eventual Consistency Today: Limitations, Extensions, and Beyond

Abstract

In a July 2000 conference keynote, Eric Brewer, now VP of engineering at Google and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, publicly postulated the CAP (consistency, availability, and partition tolerance) theorem, which would change the landscape of how distributed storage systems were architected. Brewer’s conjecture--based on his experiences building infrastructure for some of the first Internet search engines at Inktomi--states that distributed systems requiring always-on, highly available operation cannot guarantee the illusion of coherent, consistent single-system operation in the presence of network partitions, which cut communication between active servers. Brewer’s conjecture proved prescient: in the following decade, with the continued rise of large-scale Internet services, distributed-system architects frequently dropped "strong" guarantees in favor of weaker models--the most notable being eventual consistency.