Papers We Love: Replicated Data Consistency Explained Through Baseball

This very easy to read paper explains eventual consistency, strong consistency, and several other distributed consistency models by analogy to baseball.

"Some cloud storage services, like Windows Azure, replicate data while providing strong consistency to their clients while others, like Amazon, have chosen eventual consistency in order to obtain better performance and availability. A broader class of consistency guarantees can, and perhaps should, be offered to clients that read shared data. During a baseball game, for example, different participants (the scorekeeper, umpire, sportswriter, and so on) benefit from six different consistency guarantees when reading the current score. Eventual consistency is insufficient for most of the participants, but strong consistency is not needed either."

You can read the paper for free at:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/replicated-data-consistency-explained-through-baseball/

Please feel free to read the paper ahead of time OR just show up for food and conversation!