How Cosmos DB ensures data consistency in the global cloud

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing isn’t like working on-premises. Instead of limiting code to one or maybe two datacenters, we’re designing systems that span not just continents but the entire world. And that’s where we start to get issues. Even using fiber connections, the latency of crossing the Atlantic Ocean is around 60ms, though in practice delays are around 75ms. The Pacific is wider, so latency through trans-Pacific fiber is around 100ms.

Delays add up, and they make it hard to ensure that distributed databases are in sync. That makes it harder still to be sure that a query in the U.K. will return the same result as one in the U.S. Yes, most replication strategies mean that eventually the two will have the same content, but there’s a big question over just when that will happen. If the connections are busy, or there a lot of database writes, data can easily get delayed…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3198394/database/how-cosmos-db-ensures-data-consistency-in-the-global-cloud.html