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Re: Swift Consistency Guarantees?

 

Hi Andi,

My perspective is that I'm working on an application that should work
with arbitrary service providers using swift. Therefore, I'm interested
in the minimal set of guarantees that I can always rely on, no matter
how the service provider has configured his particular swift instance.

Best,
Nikolaus


On 01/20/2012 04:10 PM, andi abes wrote:
> I'm finding this thread a bit confusing. You're comparing offered
> SERVICES to Software. While some of the details of the software will
> dictate what's possible, some are heavily dependent on how you deploy
> the swift software, and what kind of deployment decisions you (or your
> service provider) make.
> 
> As an extreme example - if you deploy 1 container server in a highly
> available fashion (hardware style), the you probably could get
> consistent container listings in the different update followed by read
> scenarios. Hosting huge swift installations with such a setup is not
> realistic - but that doesn't say you can't do that.
> 
> Similarly, swift offers quite a lot of flexibility in setting the
> eventual consistency window sizes (replication frequency, rates and
> such). So, while there are theoretical answers to missing replicas, the
> likelihood of those occurring depends on your deployment and operational
> practices employed. (e.g. how many replicas are made, how quickly are
> failed nodes/drives fixed and their content replicated to their
> replacement etc). 
> In the amazon case, much of this is captured in the 17 9's or the 3 9's
> guarantees for the reduced redundancy class. 
> 
> If your approach is from an API perspective, then issues around # of
> replicas (which is deployment parameter) are probably not relevant - if
> you trust your provider.
> 
> If your approach in this is from a Swift developer / deployer
> perspective  - then nvm. keep asking, cause it's much easier to read
> email than python ;)
> 


   -Nikolaus

-- 
 »Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a Banana.«

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