Paper Info
Title
Characterizing the Consistency of Online Services (Practical Experience Report)
Abstract
While several proposals for the specification and implementation of various consistency models exist, little is known about what is the consistency currently offered by online services with millions of users. Such knowledge is important, not only because it allows for setting the right expectations and justifying the behavior observed by users, but also because it can be used for improving the process of developing applications that use APIs offered by such services. To fill this gap, this paper presents a measurement study of the consistency of the APIs exported by four widely used Internet services, the Facebook Feed, Facebook Groups, Blogger, and Google+. To conduct this study, our work (1) proposes definitions for a set of relevant consistency properties, (2) develops a simple, yet generic methodology comprising a small number of tests, which probe these services from a user perspective, and try to uncover consistency anomalies that are key to our definitions, and (3) reports on the analysis of the data obtained from running these tests for a period of several weeks. Our measurement study shows that some of these services do exhibit consistency anomalies, including some behaviors that may appear counter-intuitive for users, such as the lack of session guarantees for write monotonicity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/DSN.2016.64
2016 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Session guarantees,consistency,measurement study,Internet online services
Synchronization,World Wide Web,Computer science,Consistency model,Distributed computing,The Internet
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4673-8892-4
2
0.39
References 
Authors
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Filipe Freitas120.39
João Leitão215916.95
Nuno M. Preguiça321522.41
Rodrigo Rodrigues4434.86