Why Researchers Are So Inconsistent About Consistency

TL;DR A consistency model only makes sense in the context of a particular system model. Each research area assumes a different system model, so they all ended up with different consistency models that can’t be compared. Doh!

For my generals exam, I did a literature review of models for operation ordering from architecture, systems and database communities. I read a cross-section of papers that most people probably do not look at together, which gave me some interesting insights into these models.

What do I mean by models for operation ordering? In particular, I am talking about models that define guarantees to programmers about how operations to their data will be executed (or appear to be executed). These are usually termed consistency models but also coherence models and isolation models. Due to the sheer number of blog posts about these models, there is obviously a lot of interest as well as confusion on this topic.

In this post, I will attempt to clear up some of this confusion by explaining why it is so hard to compare consistency models from different research areas and why there is so much different and confusing terminology.

Why do we use consistency models?

Systems like processor cache coherence mechanisms, database management systems and distributed storage systems hide a very complex set of moving parts from application programmers. Consistency models detail exactly which parts are hidden and which parts are not.

More specifically, consistency models detail the execution of operations on application data. We can define an anomoly as a sequence of operations that is not possible from a single-threaded, unreplicated system. Given this definition, the system model dictates which anomolies are possible (due to the various replicas and concurrently executing operations), while the consistency model dictates which (of the possible) anomolies the system hides from the application. This allows the application programmer to reason about how to use the system to handle their data.

Why can’t researchers agree?

Without a system model, consistency models are underspecified. Basically, you need to know all of the parts of the system before talking about which ones are hidden and which ones are not. Worse, because system models from different research areas are different, consistency models from each research area are underspecified in different ways, making them impossible to compare. It doesn’t help that research techniques are constantly crossing over to other communities that re-purpose them (i.e., linearizability for transactions?).

To give an example, processor consistency models assume that each processor always reads from its own cache (of course!). In contrast, eventual consistency models were designed for distributed systems where application clients might read at different replicas (because a replica is not available due to a network partition). As a result, models like eventual consistency’s session ordering are completely meaningless in an architecture system model.

What can I do about this?

It helps when trying to understand a new consistency model to understand the system model first. For example, are operations in the system assumed to be atomic? Are there replicas in the system? Is there concurrency? Do clients always access the same replica?

The nice thing is that strong consistency models are basically the same for all system models because they hide all of the moving parts from the application and make the system appear as if it is running just one operation at a time on one replica. Unfortunately, this means that weak consistency models tend to be confusing no matter what we do because they reveal parts of the inner workings of the system to the application programmer and force him or her to deal with it.

Conclusion

At first glance, it might seems like researchers are just trying to make things hard for anyone that hasn’t spent years learning their language (like the cool kids on the playground that you could hang out with if you could only learn their lingo). But really, researchers in each area just get so accustomed to their system model that they couldn’t imagine why anyone would talk about something else! And maybe we should all use strong consistency because that’s the only thing that researchers can agree on.