Read-After-Write Consistency in Amazon S3

S3 has an “eventual consistency” model, which presents certain limitations on how S3 can be used. Today, Amazon released an improvement called “read-after-write-consistency” in the EU and US-west regions (it’s there, hidden at the bottom of the blog post). Here’s an explanation of what this is, and why it’s cool. What is Eventual Consistency? Consistency is a key concept in data storage: it describes when changes committed to a system are visible to all participants. Classic transactional databases employ various levels of consistency, but the golden standard is that after a transaction commits the changes are guaranteed to be visible to all participants. A change committed at millisecond 1 is guaranteed to be available to all views of the system - all queries - immediately thereafter. ...

December 10, 2009 · 8 min · shlomo