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An Overview of Consistency Patterns
One of the beautiful things about computers is that they are consistent machines. Machines are built based on the pattern of work for which they are designed. The beauty comes in the shapes that come out of those ingratiating patterns. Like steady clockwork gears through time, the electricity coursing through your life right now has a very strong consistency. That’s why it is a good utility: it is reliable. It’s what powers the memory your computer holds.
Data is replicated synchronously in a read or write which has strong consistency patterns. Synchronously means as quickly as possible with all fidelity.
Compare the fidelity of a strong consistent pattern to an eventual consistency pattern and you’ll notice a glaring difference: writes might take some time, so assume your data will be ready to read after some normal amount of time. You know what this feels like: you send an email with an attachment and you pray it doesn’t take too long to be delivered to your recipient. Imagine wondering if the message you sent went through at all! We can consider email and DNS servers as good examples of this pattern because they are asynchronous in nature.
Lastly, and most importantly, we arrive at weak consistency patterns. This pattern is most often seen in communication schemes where it is possible to request a previous message again at…
