How consistent is your cloud application?

  • Authors:
  • Kamal Zellag;Bettina Kemme

  • Affiliations:
  • McGill University, Montreal, Canada;McGill University, Montreal, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Third ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Current cloud datastores usually trade consistency for performance and availability. However, it is often not clear how an application is affected when it runs under a low level of consistency. In fact, current application designers have basically no tools that would help them to get a feeling of which and how many inconsistencies actually occur for their particular application. In this paper, we propose a generalized approach for detecting consistency anomalies for arbitrary cloud applications accessing various types of cloud datastores in transactional or non-transactional contexts. We do not require any knowledge on the business logic of the studied application nor on its selected consistency guarantees. We experimentally verify the effectiveness of our approach by using the Google App Engine and Cassandra datastores.