Consistency vs Availability?

[tushar1391]

Design Cache Q: Consistency vs Availability?

[ran_biron]

This really depends on the requirements. I've met (and designed) cache systems that required complete consistency so their caching layer had to keep that promise. A good example of that is the TimesTen from Oracle. Another good example is the file system cache.

[kousik_nath]

All depends on the purpose of the system. But in most of the cases systems need to be highly available. Availability dominates consistency. Example: online flight / bus booking site where the booking eventually happens on real time price but if the customer sees stale data while searching routes is not a big problem. Eventually the customer will be served with the real time price. So consistency is not of much importance in this scenario. But in systems like Stock market / online flash sale, consistency is extremely important.

[vigjadel]

I have a question here. Here in the example 30 TB of data is split across 420 machines. So each machine is going to hold separate piece of data. So I thought consistency cannot be achieved anyways here.

[koby_leung]

Consistency talks about the cache and the DB I think, not the cache and another piece of the cache.

[chisni]

Right.I was surprised at that call.I think Cache needs to be consistent more than it being available.

[towhid]

@vigjadel , since every machine is responsible for a separate piece of data, then no machine needs to communicate of the consistency.

[ashutosh-kumar_233]

If we get the appropriate data with high latency should be fine over corrupted/stale data. Host may crash with inconsistent data

[100pipers]

Hi all,

I didn’t understand the need for comparing consistency and availability here. How would making the system more available compromise consistency ? Could someone help here ?

[yiqi-kang]

choosing between consistency and availability depends on what is this cache be used for.

[naman-mishra]

CAP theorem dictates that in case of failures in a distributed system, only two out of the three properties can be satisfied at the most. The compromise has to be made only in failure scenarios not in normal operating conditions.