Characteristics of Eventual Consistency
The characteristics of eventual consistency include:
- Asynchronous Updates
- Updates to the system are not immediately propagated to all nodes.
- Instead, they are propagated asynchronously, which can lead to temporary inconsistencies between nodes.
- Lack of Strong Consistency Guarantees
- Eventual consistency does not provide strong guarantees about when updates will be propagated or when all nodes will converge to a consistent state.
- Instead, it guarantees that given enough time and no further updates, all nodes will eventually converge to a consistent state.
- Delayed Propagation
- There can be delays in propagating updates across nodes, which can result in temporary inconsistencies where different nodes have different views of the data.
- These inconsistencies are resolved over time as updates are propagated and applied to all nodes.
- Conflict Resolution
- In cases where conflicting updates occur (e.g., two nodes update the same data concurrently), eventual consistency requires a conflict resolution mechanism to resolve the conflict and ensure that all nodes eventually converge to a consistent state.
- Eventual Convergence
- The key characteristic of eventual consistency is that all nodes will eventually converge to a consistent state, given enough time and no further updates.
- This means that temporary inconsistencies are resolved over time, and the system eventually becomes consistent.
- High Availability
- Eventual consistency can improve system availability by allowing reads and writes to continue even in the presence of network partitions or node failures.
- Clients can continue to access the system and perform operations, even if some nodes are temporarily unavailable.
Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems | Learn System Design
Consistency in a distributed system refers to the property that the data stored on different nodes of the system is always in agreement with each other. In other words, all nodes in the system have the same view of the data at all times.
Important Topics for the Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems
- What is the Importance of Data Consistency?
- What is Eventual Consistency?
- Characteristics of Eventual Consistency
- Real-Life Example of Eventual Consistency
- How Eventual Consistency works?
- Use-Cases of Eventual Consistency
- Impact of Eventual Consistency on (System performance, Scalability, and Availability)
- Differences between Eventual Consistency and Strong Consistency
- Implementation of Eventual Consistency
- Benefits of Eventual Consistency
- Challenges of Eventual Consistency